


palms

by Xine



Series: palms [1]
Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Character Study, Eventual Happy Ending, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Light Angst, M/M, One-Sided Mink/Aoba, One-Sided Noiz/Aoba, POV Second Person, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-18 22:13:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2363924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xine/pseuds/Xine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the lingering feeling of his piercings poking at your chin, you know better than to think that the buzz in your veins is from the nicotine swimming in your blood, and you dimly wonder how you’re going to kill yourself with this maniac sticking around.</p><p>(Second-person Mink POV, set after True Route good ending)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Something's wrong when you regret  
> Things that haven't happened yet
> 
> [ _1940._ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVHQNGzPbOI)

You're making your way back to the North District when you notice the rhythmic sound of his steps echoing your own. You pretend you've noticed nothing, not turning your head around until any semblance of a crowd is washed away entirely and it's just the two of you walking among debris; forgotten, miscellaneous rubbish lining your path as you walk towards a building that looks about ready to crumble at any moment.

Before walking inside you turn your head enough to speak to him, asking why he's followed you all the way here, and you're only met with a blank face and a nonchalant shrug. You snort at him—you get no reaction, unsurprisingly—and you don't bother to hold the door open for him as you head into the short stairwell.

You know he isn't afraid of you; he was beside you, beating hooded, brainwashed Morphine members—their empty eyes still haunt you, in a way, a reminder of what awful things Toue had not only done to you, but to others as well—with the same mercilessness you learned to adopt in the last several years. You found it strange, him taking a place in the forefront rather than acting as a medium of support as he had done before, but with the hot-blooded man in red carrying Aoba on his back and the one in that ridiculous gas mask cradling the blue bag with that dog Allmate inside of it, you supposed he didn’t have much of an option.

You’ve taunted him in a similar way you’ve done with the others, simply calling him a maniac—even if you did refer to people by their names, why would you ever refer to him with a ridiculous title like Noiz—and all you were met with was an annoyed response of the contrary.

And you’re not quite sure how old he really is, but you know he isn’t afraid of you, and honestly, you find it a bit impressive.

You make it to the basement and you can feel his presence not far behind you. The door swings open with a painful creak, and sprawled in front of you is a familiar couch, resting beside the faded and scuffed tag; the concrete beneath it torn, damaged, broken. As you expected, the entire basement floor is empty—you told them to leave—and you think if you touched the ground you wouldn’t feel a hint of warmth left over from the people who used to fill this place.

He makes a scoffing sound from behind you—the first sound he has made since he began ghosting your path—and when you look over your shoulder you see him surveying the environment, observing the decaying walls and the rotting cardboard boxes shoved into the corners, forgotten and likely full of useless litter. This current image you have of him—clad in several layers of mint greens and dark blues and pure whites—tells you that his clothes don’t have a single snag or tear in them; the only hint of filth to be found is resting on his shoes. You don’t feel insulted, not at all, but the cool air poking through the rips in your jeans and coating your bare right arm is something you’re suddenly very aware of.

You move forward and he doesn’t tail you this time; instead, he goes in a perpendicular direction, skimming over the place you don't call home but was ultimately just the place you could return to every night. His stance is one of little care: hands tucked in his pockets, back slightly hunched over, feet lazily treading as if he wasn’t in a completely foreign place with a man who could easily kill him with minimal effort. Yes, definitely—he isn’t afraid of you.

The room you sleep in—not your bedroom, not your home—is a welcome sight despite how bare it is. You pull the pipe from your pocket as you approach the small altar set up against the wall, mind scattered on what to say in your prayers, on what your next action should be.

You’re stuck at a stalemate: Toue’s gone, but you didn’t kill him. You’ve gotten your revenge, indirectly, but Toue didn’t die for the reasons you needed him to. You’ve dissolved your team, but you have him—the maniac—making circles in the other room.

You rest the pipe down on the small table, closing your eyes while you trace the handwoven threads of the textile beneath your fingers, one of the few things you have left of the people you’ve lost, an image to remind you of your goals and the path you decided for yourself.

Opening your eyes to the sound of steps at your back, the door opens then shuts before you turn around, facing your newest and last annoyance intruding on your moment of silence.

He meets your gaze easily, expressionless, narrow, pale eyes staring right back at you. The smile on his face appears long before it reaches his eyes. He asks what you’re doing in such a sad and shitty excuse for a home base, making a remark at the fruitless efforts Rib teams have repeated the past few years and how it reflects in the poor state of the building he’s standing in.

You ask him what he wants, not answering his question, and he in turn doesn’t answer yours, but instead walks forward with that smile still stuck on his face, his eyes searching across your own and scrutinizing you as you stand there, unmoving. You follow him with only your eyes.

The fatigue in your bones finally settles and spreads across your body, and you realize how tired you really are.

When the tips of his boots are just a few centimeters away from yours, you take in his natural scent and contemplate what it reminds you of. You watch him carefully, and when your eyes meet once again neither of you dare to break contact. Slowly but confidently, he rests his hand upon the shackle around your neck, bandage-wrapped fingers slightly stroking the metal surface as he tilts his head. All you respond with is a glare, piercing the gaze joining yours, but he either seems to not take notice or simply not care.

He asks you why you wear these around your neck, around your wrists, that insufferable grin not disappearing from his lips. He’s aggravating you—he’s good at it and he knows—with inquiries you will not reply to. You can feel his breath lingering faintly on your jaw as he looks up at you, slowly coming in closer. You place a hand on his hip, your grip tight enough to leave a bruise, but he doesn’t flinch at all.

Just looks at you with that smirk.

His eyelids flutter closed as he presses his lips against yours, and the moment you open your mouth he invades it greedily, gnawing at your tongue as you kiss him back. Dragging your tongue along the roof of his mouth you take a small amount of enjoyment at the shuddering, quiet moan you elicit from him. You continue to watch him, your vision flooded with the light skin of his face, dark eyelashes resting upon his cheekbones, strawberry blond brows furrowed into a knot on his forehead.

It’s funny—you find yourself drifting away much in the same way he is, the silver ball pierced on his tongue tracing against your teeth solidly.

Briefly, his eyes flutter open again and look right back at you—there’s a glint in them that you almost miss, one you almost can’t read—before he breaks the kiss to catch his breath. and it’s almost immediately that he lunges for your mouth again.

You try teasing him—nibbling at his lower lip, swiping the tip of your tongue across his upper lip, stroking the muscle in his mouth with your own—and it works, a little, enough for him to shift the hand settled on the shackle to press against your chest, the other hand curling around the back of your neck. You don’t touch him back, leaving your fingers wrapped on his side, digging your thumb in the soft flesh above his hipbone. You wouldn’t dare give him the satisfaction of anything other than this.

However, it ends as quickly as it started, lips parting with a wet sound as he separates from you. He stays only a short distance from you, hands still settled on your chest and neck, settling fully back onto his heels. That same smirk from before—perhaps a little more dazed in appearance this time—spreads on his bruised lips, rose-colored and faintly glistening in the light of the bulb you neglected to switch off the last time you were in this room.

As he steps back and removes his hands from your person, he remarks that you’re “surprisingly good”, licking at the slightly broken skin on his bottom lip as blood attempts to seep out of the tiny wound you’ve given him. His face falls into that emotionless expression you’re familiar with; he studies his hand after pressing the back of it against his lips, dabbing the small amount of blood onto the bandages.

While you ignore his statement, you turn around again and ask him if that was what he came here for; he replies with simple affirmation, responding to you properly for once, even if the tone was laced with the same ‘what of it’ attitude of his.

You pick the pipe back up again, the small instrument a comfortable weight in your hand.

You tell him that he got what he wanted, that he can leave, but he says nothing. You look back at him and he only stares at you, his swollen lips closed and his eyes narrowed—he’s studying you again, and you realize that you cannot read him as well as you feel you should.

Pulling a lighter out of your coat pocket, you light the tobacco in the pipe as you leave the room, telling him to do whatever he pleases while breathing smoke into your lungs.

He does not follow you as you walk down the hallway; not as you cross the large center room; not even as you climb the stairs. You make it outside without anyone shadowing you.

The sun has begun to set past the empty, abandoned buildings in front of you, painting the surroundings with vibrant reds and oranges, clouds floating above your head in brilliant pinks and blues, and you think of how this is the one time of day where this ghost town actually looks somewhat alive.

You lean against the wall beside the door, taking a drag on the pipe with practiced ease. As the smoke emerges from of your lungs you listen to the sound of wings flapping, and soon the pink bird appears from above your head—he was waiting on the rooftop of this building, you assume—and lands upon your shoulder. He must have gone off somewhere when you were returning from the collapsed Oval Tower, that kid trailing right behind you, and it seems that regardless of how long or how far, Tori will always find his place back onto your shoulder.

You give him a quick glance as he adjusts his wings, but he doesn’t pay you much mind and turns to preen at his feathers. Your gaze returns upward to the darkening sky, and you take another drag from the pipe.

With the lingering feeling of his piercings poking at your chin, you know better than to think that the buzz in your veins is from the nicotine swimming in your blood, and you dimly wonder how you’re going to kill yourself with this maniac sticking around.

* * *

 

Night has fallen by the time the tobacco has completely burned away. The maze of stars expanding across the black canvas hanging over the North District is beautiful—real—and you remember how fantastic and fake the stars in Platinum Jail appeared to you.

You sigh as you tap out the ashes from the pipe, placing it in your pocket once it has emptied, and settling alongside the lighter. When you push yourself off the wall, Tori lifts himself from his perch and keeps himself afloat in the air until you open the door; he flies past your head as you step inside, and the door closes behind you loudly, the echo following the bird ahead of you.

When you go from the stairwell to the center room, the first thing that catches your eyes is the curled up figure sitting on the deteriorating sofa, and from the cluster of clothing it’s hard to mistake who it is.

As you come closer you take note of his posture: head lolled onto the spot of where his chest and shoulder meet, one leg leaning against the arm of the couch while the other leg lays on its side on the cushion, arms held close to his body as if he was in the middle of using his Coil. Shifting your gaze over you see the myriad of his accessories resting on the top of an empty oil drum; his hat, studded cuffs, tie with tiepin still attached, the Allmate cubes, matching belt, bandages resting in a neat little pile on top of it all. His shoes rest on the floor beside it.

Tori is perched on the back of the sofa, looking down at the person sleeping soundly as if he’s someone he’s never seen before, and you know without him facing you that he’s questioning you—not the maniac—on why he’s here.

For a long moment you stand there and contemplate on what you should do, but your decision, honestly, doesn’t make much sense to you, and you only manage a sigh as you walk closer to the brat asleep on your sofa.

You lightly lift up his arms so you can push his resting leg toward the one pressed against his torso, and once he’s positioned in a proper ball you snake your arms beneath his knees and under his shoulder blades. He lifts easily in your grasp—though he’s heavier than he looks—and you’re careful to rest his head on your shoulder rather than the edge of the shackle hanging on your neck. The maniac doesn’t wake, hardly stirred at all, but he does nuzzle his head against your arm—just a bit.

The pink cockatoo examines your rare moment of kindness and you refuse to acknowledge his chuckling as he flies away, likely looking for a different place to perch himself.

The one slumbering in your hold had left the doorways open—closed but not entirely shut—and you’re able to maneuver through without much issue. Entering the room you sleep in—not your bedroom, not your home—you glance down at the head lolled onto your shoulder; he looks young, younger than usual, and the braid of your hair must be tickling at his nose, but he’s completely ignorant to it.

Carefully, you lie him down onto the small cot that’s molded to the shape of your body, and he remains unawakened. The steady breaths shrinking, expanding his torso do not change, and all you can think is that he’s like a child—slumbering without a care in the world.

Even with his face laid bare and vulnerable, you still can’t read him as well as you should.

You reach upward to switch the light bulb off, the room flooded with darkness, and as you leave to head back to the sofa you remember how you feel like you’re two decades older than you really are.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spent and sighing with a look in your eye  
> Spent and sweating with a look on your face like  
> Sweet revelation  
> Sweet surrender
> 
> [ _Thinking of you._ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJWM52RS7Cg)

When you awake the next morning it’s because of a painful knot that formed in your neck overnight; your body isn’t used to sleeping while sitting up anymore, and it’s difficult to lift your head from the back of the sofa without a tight pain shooting from your neck down to your lower back.

Bleary eyed, you pull the Coil out of your pocket to check the time and it’s hardly half-past 3am—the sun hasn’t even begun rising. You shut it off and dig the heels of your hands against your eye sockets. The center of your skull—the spot right behind your sinuses—aches dully, but it doesn’t matter how hard you push at your eyes; you know it will do little to help.

You stand up with a grunt, the muscles in your back straining as you rotate your shoulders to stretch them. Something in your spine pops as you twist your torso behind you, and you feel substantially better right after.

Grabbing your coat from its hanging place over the armrest, the lack of any sound at all rings in your ears; Tori rests in sleep mode on an exposed bar of metal jutting out of the crumbled concrete over your head, and when you turn to the left there’s no sign of that maniac ever being here, all of his belongings gone.

Navigating through the hallways and entering the room you put him in, you’re met with a dark, small chamber with no one in it. Switching the light on, everything is the same as you left it: textiles, pots, candles, tobacco on the table left untouched. The few stacked books on the shelves, as well as the boxes on the adjacent wall’s shelving, are coated in a thin layer of dust. The only change, however, is that the cot has been made—you never bother to make the bed yourself—and the sheets are flattened onto the mattress with more care that you would expect from him.

You thread your fingers through the ropes of your hair. In a way, you’re glad that he’s gone, though you’re unsure on why he left so early; electricity is nearly non-existent in the North District, and the only means of lighting is the faint light cast by the moon or from the bright screen of a Coil.

And who knows what—or rather, who—may be lurking out in the middle of the night. You aren’t worried about him; you know he can take care of himself, that he can hold his own. You’ve watched him fight with remarkable ease and power, equipping brass knuckles and nothing else.

You aren’t worried, but you do think he’s an idiot for leaving so early.

Pushing the thought aside—there’s nothing to do about it—you dig out the contact case and the pipe from their respective pockets, then set them aside on the table. You fold your coat up neatly and leave it on the stool, leaving it there to put back on after a shower. Taking the case from the table you twist open the two compartments and dab a finger into one, catching the blue lens and moving to press it onto your right eye.

The distant slam of a closing door grabs your attention as you blink the contact lens into place. Pulling the other lens by the tip of your finger, you put that one in quickly and close the case right afterward.

From the direction and the volume of the sound you conclude that it came from up the stairwell on the other side of the building, and, whoever it is, they’re close to the entrance of the center room. You head in that direction immediately, unconsciously clenching your fists on your way there.

You step into the large room the same time the intruder enters on the opposite side, and you let your fists lax when you register that it’s the maniac again, wearing the same clothes from earlier yet not looking like he had slept in them at all. He’s carrying a white plastic bag at his side, standing in his lousy, usual posture, sticking the unoccupied hand in his pants pocket.

He gestures with the bag in his hand as he tells you he brought food. You raise an eyebrow in response and you think the action amuses him, the small grin pulling at his lips as he walks in your direction. You meet him halfway and he promptly sits down onto the sofa. You watch him unravel the knot made in the plastic handles, but you’re more concerned on his reasoning behind feeding you than joining him on the cushions.

It doesn’t take much thinking to figure him out.

He gives you a look—you’re certain you saw his eyes trace the length of your body for a brisk moment—as if he’s waiting for you sit beside him, but he turns his attention back to the bag in his lap soon after. He pulls out a boxed meal wrapped in a smaller plastic bag by the knot. His other hand searches from something in the bottom of the plastic as he shoves the box towards you, and when you take it from him you can’t help the smirk spreading on your face.

You wonder if he could sense it because he looks up at you again and asks you with an accusing, flat “what.” All you say is “you’re welcome,” and you get a little kick from his instant reaction to tell you to shut up as he hands you chopsticks.

The moment you sit down the scent of soap rushes into your senses; not only did he take the time to get food, but he must have gone somewhere—you’d think his home, but you wonder if he even has one—to bathe himself as well.

The people you spent most of your days with—your old team members—were all quite musky, some of them going a few days without a shower. His clean, powder-like scent is refreshing, welcoming, and you relish in it for a brief moment.

He moves his gaze to you when you open the wide paper box and observes as you take a bite out of a rolled omelette. Looking away as you swallow he tells you that he guessed on what to get you. You won’t deny that the food’s quite good, but you can’t remember when the last time you had a proper breakfast was. Beside you he unwraps and flips open the styrofoam container in his lap. He digs into his pasta instantly, and you examine his vigor from the corner of your eye as you continue to eat.

Not only did he get food for the both of you, but he went to two different early-morning eateries.

It’s getting easier to read him and you can’t help but enjoy it.

* * *

 

Afterward, you both sit silently for a while, empty take-out boxes tucked away in the plastic bag on the floor. He types away at his Coil, alternating between at least three screens as he, you assume, relays information to someone; the text scrolls too fast for you to read it from your viewing angle. The light from the hologram illuminates his face with a slight bloom, contours of cheeks and nose softening, making him look younger and perhaps a little brighter.

On your own Coil you search for news on the events of yesterday, but as you expected, it’s arduously slow—most sites express more confusion and questions than supplying any concrete answers on the status of Toue Inc. or any guests of Platinum Jail who may have gotten caught in the collapse of Oval Tower. You shut off your Coil, dissatisfied, and lie back onto your seat.

The maniac at your side pays you no attention—as if you’re not even there—and he’s curled up in the same position from last night. He appears comfortable if not relaxed, heels of his shoes digging into the fabric of the cushions beneath him, and if he was putting any more weight down it would create another tear to accompany the plethora of rips already there.

You get up and leave for the hallway, hearing a pause in the repetitive sound of his typing as you walk away that ends just a moment later, and you wonder what it is about you that he finds so compelling that you could effortlessly and inadvertently break his concentration.

You make it into the long hallway, both walls lined with identical metal doors. Some are rusted and hanging off the edges, others stained with dark patches, the remnants of sweat and blood from fights that broke out when your back was turned. It was often that the fluorescent light in the hall would cut out randomly, unexpectedly throughout the day, so it became imperative that you memorized the distance between the room you slept in and the rundown showers. After living in this crumbling structure for so long you could navigate it without problem if you were to suddenly become blind.

Like with any other door in here the hinges creak painfully as you swing open the entrance to the communal showers—you think that this building was once either a sports gym or a small hospital, but ever since you’ve been here it has only appeared to you as a complicated garbage bin—and you’re welcomed to the scent of mold, the noise of dripping water, the flickering of aging electric lamps. The tiles beneath your boots crack as you search for a showerhead with leaking joints, the only one with any supply of running water.

You find two: the first one you test with a slight twist of the water valve, and the bit of water that it pours before stuttering to a stop is tinted with rust, pooling at your feet as it slowly flows down into the uncovered drainpipe. The second one has a valve that initially struggles to spin counter-clockwise, but the water that it spits out is as clean as the limited water tank can give you.

This is a routine that you’ve repeated a hundred times before, sitting on a bathroom stool as your fingers pull at the laces of your boots, humming of fluorescent lights beating into your eardrums, but it is the first time you’ve done it without the echo of chattering floating through the hallways. Your old team members—your subordinates—are a distant thought to you now, the gradually diminishing weights of a shampoo bottle and a shrinking bar of soap a reminder that you—and that fucking kid—are the only ones to ever step foot into this building again.

You pull the tall boots from your legs and set them aside, and like every time you’ve done this you dig your fingernails underneath the pins of your shackles, holding your arm out as it’s unlocked. The large metal restraint smashes onto the floor with a loud thud, rattling chains muffled by the volume of the impact. Physically, you feel lighter—you always do when they fall off your body—yet even now, the weight hasn’t lifted from your soul; the shackles ever present, your newest symbol for your newest failure, they mock you from the cracking ceramic when the second wrist manacle lands beside the first.

The locked neck restraint was always the heaviest of the three you wear, but they haven’t created any aches in the knotted muscles of your shoulders for a long time now. This restraint you can settle, not drop, onto the floor, and you stack the manacles next to your boots; your gloves join them after you peel the thin cotton from your wrists. You take out your contacts, remove the feathers from your braids, pull off your headband, strip yourself of your shirt, unbuckle your belt and step out of your jeans. Your image is dismantled onto the floor like you were never wearing it at all.

Your bracelet hangs around your wrist, and standing raw like this is the only time you get close to being the person you once were: the child who lost his parents and the man who lost his home. You look down at your callused hands and you don’t know if you could ever be him again.

Most things in this building are broken; the showers are not exempt from that fact. The water pressure is weak, the temperature hardly lukewarm, but it’s all you’ve ever known. Water pouring onto your slowly dampening hair, you lace through dreadlocks with soapy fingers, scratching at your scalp with the hope that the sensation will simultaneously relieve the pounding building in your skull.

Despite that the water isn’t hot enough to soothe your body like the baths you took when you were young, the feeling of flowing water rolling down your back drowns out your thoughts and allows you to quietly roll shampoo into your dreads.

When you switch to scrubbing down your body with an old washcloth, your lack of scars isn’t new but it is something that—sometimes, every once in a while—surprises you, with the life you have lived not being a particularly painless or kind one. Toue never made any lasting marks, nothing that would be readily visible, but perhaps it was the sympathy of the gods that your emotional wounds would be the only ones to leave scars.

You bow your head under the steady shower to wash out the shampoo buried in your hair, suds trickling over your shut eyelids, liquid pooling in your ears, where it then travels downward and fills the dips adjacent to your collarbones.

Where you stand beneath the struggling flow of the showerhead—the lights flickering over the white tile of the chamber, reflecting off the water streaming into the destroyed, rusted drain under your feet—is completely isolated. For you, there’s nothing else; the world is shut off even if may only be for a sliver of a moment, and it’s reminiscent of what the word “peaceful” meant to you as a child.

You twist the valve until it’s taut and it’s a bit delayed when the falling water stutters to a halt. Stepping back you throw your head forward, droplets splattering ahead of you and onto your feet, and soon you’re standing back up straight again. The dreadlocks hang heavily off the top of your head, saturated with water, and you start wringing them, roughly twisting and rolling them in your hands.

Across to the far side of the washroom is a single towel draped on a hook—the towel you’ve always used, colored chestnut and threading at the edges. It’s soft when you take it from the wall; when you told your team that you were finished, that after going to Platinum Jail you wouldn’t be returning and that they should leave as well, one of the men in charge of laundry must have washed it for the final time and left it. You don’t know if it a consideration for the dead or if he honestly believed you’d come back after all.

They always revered you, respected you, and you made a family without meaning to. You’re silently thankful for the small gesture, even if it was highly likely that you never would have known about it.

You towel your body dry enough to slip back into your jeans and buckle your belt, then, after leaving to grab a clean shirt from the small closet next door, you put that on as well. The towel soaks up any residual water left in your hair as it’s wrapped around over your head, and you sit down on the stool again to lace up the boots around your calves.

When you stand up the side of your shoe taps the neck restraint on the floor, and for a long time you stare at the three manacles lying on the floor, undecided on what you should do with them. They don’t mean the same thing to you anymore.

You pick up the gloves and feathers, but you turn around, leaving the shackles behind you.

* * *

 

You’ve put your contacts in after washing them with fresh saline, yet they rest uncomfortably against your cornea, and blinking at them only subsides the discomfort by a margin. You hang the damp towel back onto its resting hook to let it dry. You look at the loosened restraints a last time, but you walk away from them just like earlier.

You clasp the pink feathers back onto the tips of your braids, wrap the headband from your forehead to the back of your skull, then take the topmost section of hair and pull them back with a hair tie. You feel less like yourself this way and it puts you at ease.

The moment you step outside of the hallway, back into the center room, your guest advances towards you, bundling the neck of your t-shirt in his hand, and he stares at you for a second before lunging for your mouth again.

He prods at the part of your lips with his tongue, and you open up with little resistance. The steel ball glides against your lips—a strong contrast from the softness of his tongue—as the muscle pushes into your mouth almost desperately. He’s pretty good at this, and you wonder how much he gets around, how many times he’s done this, but he’s being sloppier this time, noticeably so. You probably got him impatient, taking so long in the shower, and you smirk at the idea.

You know he feels the quirk of your lips when he huffs through his nose. His fingers grip tighter on your shirt and his other hand joins, pushing your upper body to turn around, to walk backwards. Breaking the kiss, he guides you to the old sofa as you’re blind to what’s behind you—you hit an oil drum with your boot on your way—and once your calves hit the front of it you fall onto the cushions, and it’s right after that he’s kissing you again. He climbs into your lap, straddling your thighs, and letting go of your shirt he rips the hat off his head and tosses it blindly at the armrest to your left.

His hands push at your shoulders, sinking you into the back of the sofa, and your own find his hips to grip them tightly, digits sneaking under the hem of his button-up shirt. You kiss him back with the same intensity—licking at his teeth, burying your tongue into him, scraping the roof of his mouth with the tip of your tongue, pushing his head back with how strongly you’re pressing against him—and you don’t let your eyelids fall closed, and neither does he.

You’re fully concentrated, overpowering him, gradually taking complete control; the strength he put into his palms against your shoulders is weakening. He tries to push back, like an inverted game of tug-of-war, but it begins to become too much and he has to pull away to catch his breath as you settle your back onto the the sofa again.

You ask him how old he his; he tells you the number nineteen with a breathy tone in his voice as he starts grinding against your hips. His age doesn’t surprise you; he’s impulsive, uncooperative, careless, concerned mostly with himself and nothing else. In response, you roll your hips upward to meet his movements, and he grins a bit when he asks you the same question.

When you say you’re not old enough to be his dad—because it’s true; you’re only in your early thirties—you notice a short halt in his movement, a shift in the gaze he gives you, and you wonder what it means before he continues with his ministrations again, asking the whereabouts of your restraints—“never seen you without them, old man”—but you don’t dignify him with the answer.

No, you kiss him instead and it shuts him up.

You take your time, swiping your tongue against his lips, pecking at them and nibbling on the side that you hadn’t wounded from before. However, he grows impatient the longer the two on you go on for. He grinds onto your lap roughly, trailing a hand from your shoulders down to your belt.

Before he pulls the white strip of leather from its buckle, you cup the undersides of his thighs and lift him up as you stand from your seat. The sudden shift catches him off guard at first, where his unoccupied arm moves fast to support his upper body out of reflex, but he’s quick on the uptake and wraps his legs around your back, toeing off his boots as you go back into the hall.

You toss him onto the plain cot, effectively ruining the handiwork from early that morning, and immediately work to unbuckle his obnoxious, rabbit-patterned belt, kneeling over his sitting up form with your own to kiss him again. His mouth responds hungrily, almost eagerly while he unclips the Allmate cubes from his belt loops and lets them tumble onto the floor.

You dig your hand into his underwear to grab his half-hard dick, but something makes you pause.

He has piercings there.

His face is riddled with silver, his earlobes are mildly stretched, he even has rods embedded into the back of his hands, so it isn’t unbelievable, but you honestly weren’t expecting to feel cool metal poking at your hand when you grabbed him.

The brat notices your hesitation and breaks from the kiss just to tell you to keep going, his face calm, an expression completely unlike someone whose cock was in a hand that was not their own. He’s hardly reacted vocally or expressively to anything you’ve done to him, be it positive or negative, and the fact pisses you off; you’d rather him give you that condescending smirk again than to have him look so bored.

He unwraps the bandages from his right hand as you stare him down, stroking him slowly, waiting to see if his breath will hitch, his jaw go slack, his eyes flutter. You get nothing of the sort, just short exhalations. All he says is “stronger.”

You grip him hard. You don’t want to hurt him—you have no reason to be violent, not anymore—and as much as he has managed to get under your skin just within the past ten minutes, it isn’t enough to cause him harm. You grip him hard, and in return you get an exhale from him, his lips parting just a bit as he pulls the last of the bandages from his hand. He tosses the cloth over the side of the bed and goes back to undoing your belt.

He pulls you out, instantly working up and down your shaft, following your speed. The last time you did this—by yourself or with another person, you can’t remember—is a distant memory, so you understand the overwhelming adrenaline pumping through your veins and the struggle to breathe through your nose.

You move down to bite at his jaw, at his neck, to lick at the hollow of his throat, but he must be dissatisfied with the feeling because he promptly tangles his fingers into your dreads and pulls your head back up to claim your mouth, briefly, before pushing away the hair beside your face. He then takes your right earlobe in his mouth, pulling at with his teeth, the sensation making you shiver just slightly. Your hand tugs at him harder, and as you stroke him faster he lowly says he wants more, tongue tracing along the shell of your ear.

However, your attempt to get off the bed is stopped, his left hand clinging onto the nape of your neck and his right hand still curled around your dick. He states that he’s clean—you didn’t think he wasn’t—but when you try to pull back once more he sinks his nails into your skin. It’s fine, that’s what he tells you, his shallow breath mingling with yours as you narrow your eyes at him. You know what he means, and against your better judgment you yank at his waistline, pulling underwear and both pairs of pants off as he lifts one leg out of them, and immediately you shove two fingers in his mouth.

A smirk rises onto his face—that’s better, you think—as he swirls his tongue around, in between the digits, suckling on them as you continue tugging on his dick, squeezing transparent liquid from the head as it peeks out the top of your hand. He swipes a thumb to smear your own precome around the glans, pumping the full length of you with it.

With your digits thoroughly drenched you take them out, the sudden departure making a soundly pop as they pass his lips. He lies down, eyes wild, dilated, watching your every movement as your hand shifts downward.

You rub at the entrance before pushing one finger gradually into him, his body offering less resistance than you anticipated. The intrusion elicits quiet, tiny moans from his throat, and as you start pumping into him his breaths get shorter. Soon, a second finger joins as you rub at his cock; the piercing at his tip glistens with precome, and the visual is so unique to you that you can’t help but admire it.

You take pride, knowing he’s being slowly unraveled by your touch as his hand loosens its hold on your length.

If his voice were any weaker, it would have sounded like he was pleading when he implores you to hurry up. He knows what you’re about to do before you take your grip off his cock, telling you he doesn’t care, telling you he wants to come already when he hooks his still-clothed leg around your thigh.

You chuckle at his eagerness as you settle your knees properly on the bed. He sounds vaguely disgruntled when you pull your fingers out of him, and he lets go of your dick while you spit in your hand, coating yourself with an additional layer of liquid to go along with what he had already smeared onto it. Lining yourself up to his hips, you push his bare leg back to meet his shoulder, then slowly, you bury yourself into him.

He takes a sharp breath as you enter him, the air trapping itself in his lungs while he rolls his head back onto the mattress. From your view, he truly looks good, almost gorgeous, with the way his neck muscles grow taut, the way his mouth falls open, the way his jaw becomes slack, the way his black undershirt rides up his waist, the way his back arches inward as your hips meet his.

After a small pause he quietly says to move, and at first you move leisurely, but he keeps repeating commands at you—do it faster, do it harder—as he stares up at you. You oblige him, and still, with his expression looking only marginally more blissful than earlier, it seems like it isn’t enough.

You set the underside of his right knee onto your shoulder, gripping his hips and lifting them, and you drive into him at an upward angle. He doesn’t expect the sudden change, didn’t think as fast as you moved, but the spot you’re thrusting against over and over again makes him shut his eyes.

You can tell he’s enjoying this—undeniably you are, too—yet aside from the pleasure distorting his expression, there is no blood rising to his face, to the tops of his ears; there are no creases or folds forming on the bedsheets as his hands grasp them. Under the rattling of the bed frame, the slap of skin on skin, the occasional grunt erupting from your throat, you can barely hear the breaths to go along with his rising chest.

The most you get is him baring his clenched teeth as you thrust deeper, hitting harder each time.

He’s getting closer to his limit, you can tell. His brows furrow and his breaths get shorter when he reaches down to stroke himself, but he only makes it through a few before he’s finishing in his hand, his body convulsing, the heel of his foot digging into your upper back as his other leg squeezes you closer. Nearing your own, you thrust a few more times while his body goes lax before pulling out and stroking yourself. You come with a gasp, semen pooling onto your palm.

For a few moments the two of you only sit there to catch your breath. He’s the first to move, untangling his limbs from you and sitting up, and when you make eye contact with him he leans in to give you a sloppy kiss. It’s quick, hardly lasting more than a couple seconds, and you think he’s going to get up from the bed, but then he glances down at your soaked hand with curiosity.

He grabs your wrist and, without hesitation or any second thoughts, licks up some of the pearl-colored liquid spread on your fingers. You look at him incredulously, your eyes widening, brows knitting together, lips parting in disbelief while he remarks on its bitter taste. He ignores you once he lets go, shifting his legs to hang off the bed side and pull his underwear and pants back up. Then he takes a small, white handkerchief from his pocket—you wonder why he has anything like that on his person—and wipes himself as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Looking over his shoulder he asks if you’re going to clean yourself up as well, tucking his dick back into his underwear, and you stare at him, expression still frozen on your face while trying to figure him out, before you leave the cot from the opposite side.

You keep a shoebox of necessities—toilet paper, a toothbrush, a few small washcloths, deodorant—upon a wall shelf. After tucking yourself into your jeans, you reach up to the box and take off its lid, pulling a single washcloth to wipe off the mess cooling in your hand.

Turning around as you finish up, you watch him clasp the cubes back onto his belt loops, belt already secured around his waist, in the same manner like it was his morning routine. He glances over to you, then comes in close to your form to sneak a brisk lick at your bottom lip. His natural scent floods your sinuses and you finally grasp what it reminds you of.

Saying that he’ll be back soon and nothing else, he turns away and walks out of the room, the door loudly clicking closed behind him. That expression is still stuck on your face, but the lines on your forehead have gotten deeper as you think on what his motives must possibly be; you’re still struggling to read him.

Sighing, you throw the filthy washcloth onto the shelf to take care of it later and work to tighten your belt. You’re in need of a smoke, and as you pack the tobacco into the pipe, you hear the distant slam of a shutting door. Digging for the lighter from the long coat folded on the stool, you light the pipe, taking in the smoke like the thousands of times you’ve done before.

With a strange uneasiness in your chest, you blow out smoke and think he smells like rejection.


	3. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A fire then the flood  
> Could something wrong be something good?  
> Do you think you should?
> 
> [ _Palms._ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqeSVDlINiY)

He comes back the next day, and the two of you follow this rhythm of eating without a single word passing between the two of you and then fucking somewhere around the beaten-down building. This happens every few days, rarely back to back, and it’s been at least two weeks since the fall of Oval Tower.

You’re tossing a trash bag that looks like it’s about to burst at any second into a dumpster outside the boundaries of the North District when you hear the beeping of your Coil go off. You occupy most of your days with either cleaning up the miscellaneous garbage spread across the entirety of what was once the base of operations for Scratch—if you’re going to live there you may as well keep it clean—or spend afternoons in the south looking for new clothes—a near impossible task, apparently, because your tastes are too simple, too old-fashioned—and eventually having a couple drinks in a nearby club or bar until midnight.

With your teammates gone, you find that living in that building on your own is unrealistic; there’s no working fridge, so you often leave for the other districts to eat when the maniac isn’t around. You’re only ever there to do three things: sleep, shower, or having your near-daily sessions with that kid, and you don’t know how long this will all last.

Taking your Coil from your pocket, you open it to a message from sender “Rabbit Head,” a name that doesn’t take much to decipher who it is. The message only contains the words “Come here” and an address attached; judging by the street name and house number, it’s an apartment building in one of the residential districts. Glancing over the time, it’s also still pretty early, and you think he might have just recently woken up.

You sigh as you close the message and shut off your Coil, slipping it back into your pocket while you turn back to your motorcycle. Tori rests upon the junction of the handlebars, observing you as you approach, then perches onto the front edge of the seat once you’ve sat down. You, however, don’t move to start the bike.

This is the first time he’s ever contacted you, through Coil or otherwise. Usually, he’ll show up unannounced with the take-out meal of his choice that day—he gets you something different every time, but you’ve noted that he usually has some type of pizza or pasta—at around nightfall, and then leave once the both of you have finished fucking, you zipping up your jeans and him putting his pants back on. It all happens again, repeating the same thing every few days.

Turning the key in the ignition and pulling on the throttle, you follow the Allmate’s directions as you think about how this kid is just using you. He’s using you, and, honestly, you don’t mind it at all. It’s just sex; the act will only mean as much significance as you choose to give it, and you doubt he thinks highly of it either.

And it isn’t as if you’re not enjoying it, because you absolutely are. The only other thing that has kept you on your toes the past few years like this maniac has was your quest for Toue’s life. Escaping from prison, organizing your team, hunting for your trump card to get you into Platinum Jail: these are all over, all gone, and now it’s that aloof kid getting your adrenaline pumping like it used to.

Yet, while the sex is good—that’s all it is, just sex—you’re more intrigued with his intentions and his motivations, the exact nature of his returning to you several times a week. You can’t figure it out entirely; there are gaps in every conclusion you’ve come to so far, but the only means of getting your answer is to spend more time with him, to watch and see if he’ll say something, do something that will give you what you’re looking for.

The roads take you west, and the closer to your destination, farther up the hills, the buildings become nicer; clean, modern exteriors lined with tall glass doors leading onto spacious verandas. These are pricey, expensive apartments, a fact that you can see clearly.

Tori hums with a combination of curiosity and amusement. You've never been this deep in the district before, and despite the bird's tendency to fly off, it seems that not even he was aware of the rows of newer structures up here.

These apartment complexes are hardly even close to the walls of Platinum Jail, yet they look as if they belong right on the border between the shrunken city and the colossal structure. You assume that these buildings were built not long before the emergence of Toue, and there were so few residents there initially that the architecture was left largely unaffected from its occupants over the years.

If that maniac lives in one of these apartments, he definitely isn't struggling for money.

You're led into the parking lots for one of the complexes—surprisingly small for buildings so huge, particularly on this island—that is, according to the Allmate's guide, the given address. Twisting the ignition, pulling the key out, and throwing the kickstand, you rise from the bike and Tori follows suit, landing onto your shoulder as he reminds you the room number—number 502, located at the topmost floor.

The surrounding area, not just the buildings themselves, are also quite nice; the grasses are a luscious green, like the mountains that contain the island itself; the pavement and concrete are smooth, hardly damaged and without potholes; the air, if anything, feels and smells cleaner than it does downtown. Everything about this area ranges from slightly better to massively improved than what you’ve been engulfed by in your time in this country, and it, in a strange way, reminds you of home.

Walking up the metal stairways—over and over, around in a distorted loop—the tone echoes in your ears, crisp and sound as your boots climb each step. The exterior walls, when you see them up close, are made of sloppily yet craftily textured concrete painted over with a cool grey color that remind you of the stormy skies you watched as a child, like the clouds rolling over the valleys and absorbing the rays of the sun.

You’re approaching the top floor and thinking that you’re getting too sentimental.

Every door you’ve walked past is painted a stark black; across each of them are suite numbers in silver metal, matching the elegant door handles and letter boxes. Your destination is the first door to your left, on the opposite side of the stairs, and while it’s identical to all the others, there’s an aura about the maniac’s door that envelopes you as you knock the back of your hand on it.

He opens the door only a short moment later, fully dressed in his usual attire sans hat and shoes, meeting your gaze just as easily as he’s done dozens of times before. He isn’t afraid of you; you remember that. As he steps aside to invite you in and you step through the door, you note the messiness of his hair, fringe haphazardly resting on his forehead, locks sticking upwards in the back. You think he just got out of bed, and he most likely did, but your only indication is his disheveled hair; his clothes look fine.

You find its implication amusing: you’ve had sex with him more times than you can count on a single hand, yet he still put on proper clothing in anticipation of you arriving at his apartment.

He makes a remark about how you showed up sooner than he predicted when he closes the door behind you. It’s almost instantly that Tori flies from his perch to survey the new environment, disappearing around the corner to the rest of the room. The entrance way is considerably cramped, the narrow but short hall leading to what appears to be the living area, but you kneel to work on removing your boots, untying the knot easily while your host steps onto the elevated floor.

On the other side of the wall you listen to him interrogate your Allmate, who says something that you can’t quite hear, but whatever it was aggravates him more and soon after Tori is flying back into the hallway, huffing about the kid’s uncooperative disposition. You give him a knowing look while you pull off your boots, setting them beside the wall.

Walking fully into the apartment you’re met with the spacious living room, a white sofa pressed against the wall behind a glass-top coffee table; an entertainment system set up against the opposite wall, consisting of a large television wedged between two speakers, the cabinet beneath it closed but likely holding multiple appliances; the adjacent wall is mostly just a sliding glass door, the sun shining through the gaps of the blinds left not fully drawn from the wall.

To your left, on the other side of the entrance hallway, is the open kitchen. It’s unexpectedly Western-styled, black granite countertops with light grey cabinets, a deep stainless steel sink settled in the kitchen island with a small assortment rack of pots and pans hanging above it. The refrigerator matches the stove settled beside it, as well as the sink, all glimmering in a brushed steel metal. The flooring is an pentagonal black and grey tile in contrast to the light-colored wood of the living area.

You don’t have to take a look at the shower, the toilet, or his bedroom—which you assume are the three doors on the walls across from you—to understand that the owner, who watches you from his place leaning onto the kitchen island, isn’t struggling for money. You aren’t surprised, but you are impressed. He isn’t the thieving type—dishonest he is not, you’ve learned—so it appears that he makes a living, and a good one at that.

Tori perches himself onto an armrest of the sofa behind you and looks at you expectantly. You turn around to put him into sleep mode, brushing a thumb across the top of his head as his uncovered eye falls shut, and he remains in place, not moving at all. The kid walks up beside you and asks if you’re attached to the pink cockatoo Allmate, looking at the subject and not at you.

You aren’t attached to the bird, not in the way many treat them as pets or even like family, but he’s been with you for years now, a constant presence resting on your shoulder as you’ve watched team members come and go—“going” isn’t voluntary, almost always—and acting as your resource, a tool for you to use. After your failure at Oval Tower, with your plan never coming to fruition you hadn’t decided on what to do with the Allmate; originally, he would “die” as you would, shutting down when your life ended as the neural link failed.

But instead, you’re both alive, and you’re watching him sleep silently on a couch that isn’t yours.

In response, you tell your host that no, you aren’t attached, and he glances back at you with a questioning and possibly amused glint in his eyes. He reaches up and slides a hand between your coat and your t-shirt, turning to face you properly, as he tells you he hasn’t showered yet—something you faintly smell, the scent of sleep resting on his skin, but also something you deduced from the mess of hair atop of his head.

When his hand has landed on your hip like the numerous times yours have done to his, he asks if you’d like to bathe with him. At first you find the request actually appealing, but you knew your answer before he finished his sentence, and you promptly refuse, saying you’ll go in after him.

He glowers at you, asking a simple but accusing why, his hand still resting on your hip. You don’t tell him that you can’t wear contacts in the shower, don’t dignify him with a reply at all. You just return his glare, standing still for a long moment before he removes his hand from your person, repeating his question.

It’s rare for him to ask you for your reasoning, for your motivations, but this is the first time he’s wanted an answer that you wouldn’t give him.

You remain silent, and it’s clear to you that you’ve angered him as he takes a step back to evaluate you, studying your posture. When he speaks, tells you “fine,” his voice hardly reflects the expression distorting his face. You watch him clench his fists for a brief second—possibly an unconscious movement—before he turns around, shoulders taut, back straight, strides stiff as he walks to the door on the far left and slams it closed behind him.

The silence is palpable, and when you hear the showerhead screech before the rain of water echoes past the closed bathroom door, your muscles relax just slightly, your shoulders drooping, your throat letting out a sigh when you remember how rejection radiates off of his skin.

* * *

 

He doesn’t take long in the shower, and he comes out dressed the same; he would appear almost identical to what he looked like when he entered the washroom if it weren’t for the water droplets clinging to the tips of his hair. You rise from your seat on the couch, turning off your Coil as you do so. At his back he keeps the door open, but doesn’t look at you at all as he heads towards the door just across from you, then disappears into that room instead.

You glance over your shoulder at Tori, still sitting on the armrest in sleep mode, then slowly walk towards and into the open door. Thinking, you close the door quietly, and wonder why he won’t just kick you out, considering how aggravated he got with your refusal to answer just twenty minutes ago. Your guess is that, when you finish wringing the water out of your hair, when you walk out of this room, he’ll shove his tongue in your mouth like he always does, fuck you, and then push you out of the front door. It will be the same sequence of events as every other time the two of you have done this, just in reverse, just in a different place. Probably for the last time, as well.

You don’t know why, but the thought is actually a bit disappointing.

Standing in front of the empty counter beside the shower, you lift your arm to unpin the shackle around your right wrist when the sight of the restraint isn’t there at all. You removed those shackles fifteen days ago, but you hardly feel different—you haven’t since you took them off—and you realize you have done this every single day since then and make the same mistake every time.

You grunt at the thought, at your own troubled mind as you slip your fingers under the hem off your shirt—you hung up your coat by the entrance earlier—and pull it over your head, the article of clothing taking the headband with it. With practiced ease you untie your dreads and unclasp the feathers clipped to your braids, placing the pieces of yourself onto the counter, then peeling off your socks and stepping out of your jeans.

Before turning on the shower, you take out your tinted lens, settling the case at the top of your clothing pile. The water doesn’t take very long to give you hot water once you twist the valve, and as you step under the stream and let the water soak through your hair, you realize this is the first hot shower you have ever taken.

* * *

 

When you step out, you see a blur of blacks and strawberry blond in the corner of your eye, and you walk into the living area to see him tending to the plant in the corner by the sliding glass door. Looking at him as you get closer, you notice he’s only wearing the under layer of his usual outfit, the black thermal shirt and corresponding jeans making him appear much thinner than he really is. Stopping beside him, you firmly but gently grasp the arm he isn’t using to pour water into the ceramic pot, deciding to take initiative for once, but he snaps at you.

He snaps at you, fiercely pulling his arm out of your grip and telling you to not touch him with vitriol lining his words, and throws you a steady glare before brushing past you to go back into his bedroom. His words don’t sting you, but they do leave you feeling a bit annoyed.

He ignores you for a few hours afterward. You’re both breathing the same air, but he doesn’t say a word to you, doesn’t even look at you, and it’s like you’re hardly there at all. At first, he wouldn’t come out of the room he stormed into even if you knocked on the door frame. When he came out, long after you gave up on coaxing him, he sat on the floor in front of the television, and you watched him play a game for a while before he quit, muttering something about not being in the mood for it as he shut everything off again.

Your eyes watch him as he heads into the kitchen and gets to work on a meal, his back never turning around, and you sigh in resignation when you get up from the sofa, pulling the glass door open to step out on the deck.

The late afternoon sun is still hanging in the sky above you, thick white clouds passing it by as the breeze brushes your face. Carefully leaning on the half wall guarding the veranda, you absentmindedly recall that you left the pipe in your coat pocket. As mildly agitated as you are, a smoke doesn’t sound like it would improve your mood in any way, and you overlook the rows of houses and apartment complexes and think about the mountains back home.

Waiting for him to crack is wearing your patience thin, very thin, and if he refuses to acknowledge you the next time you speak, you’ll go. You leaving is likely what he’s been waiting for you to do for nearly three hours now; if he wants you gone so badly, he should drop his passive-aggressive method of doing so and just shove you through the front door himself.

It’s a dark concept, but you know that if you leave there isn’t anything waiting for you—nothing, in any way—and this brat is, or rather was, one of the few things that kept you from perishing two weeks ago. With Toue’s death being confirmed the other day—body crushed under the rubble after a fall from the tower—going home is not an option; seeing the scars of the forests beneath the flourishing new life would only bring you shame. The old building up north is of no use to you or to anyone; it has no owner, no occupants, and if anyone were to return, it would not be you.

His attitude isn’t making you angry or frustrated so much as it is making you contemplate his thought process. Since the time you first met him in the basement of that junk shop to you now standing on the veranda of his apartment, he’s been more complex, more dynamic than he initially appeared to be, and for you he’s almost like a puzzle to be solved.

But you’re close to giving up on him. You are stubborn in many ways, however, if he won’t cooperate you have no reason nor obligation to pressure him.

You push yourself off the railing and walk back inside, sliding the door closed, the afternoon air that followed you slipping through the shrinking gap in a soft breeze. Looking up, the maniac is still working in the kitchen, his body facing toward you as he chops something on the counter of the island. The sound of boiling water reaches your ears from the stove, and a small rabbit cube sits on the corner of the sink beside its owner.

You advance toward him, not saying a word, and stop in front of the small structure in an attempt at testing him. He doesn’t look up, but he does let out an irate, exasperated sigh through his nose.

Knowing that your next move is doubtlessly going to anger him further, you reach a hand out to rest on the counter and start to lean forward when he reacts instantly—your hand hadn’t even touched the surface—and shouts once more, his voice risen as he commands you not to touch him and practically threatens you with the chef’s knife pointed in your direction.

Your eyes grow wide. You’re surprised, but you stare not at his face or the blade pointed at you, but at the pool of ruby liquid forming on the stone cutting board as it gushes from the wound in his left palm. For a few moments, your body is frozen as you meet his gaze and see him not move at all, his glare unwavering as he bores his anger into your eyes.

When you shift your eyes down again, the pool of blood is slowly widening on the flat stone, soaking into the carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes he had diced without incident prior. The cube cries out in an attempt to catch the attention of its owner. From your peripheral vision you see him look down and he curses, dropping the knife as he immediately leaves the kitchen and heads into the toilet. Droplets of red chase his path on the floor, and you notice that he doesn’t cradle his injured hand.

He isn’t crying out in pain, and you understand why.

After removing the boiling pot of stew from the stove top and shutting off the large appliance, you walk over the blood trail as you approach the door, seeing the kid sitting on the toilet lid as he opens a first aid kid on his lap with a single hand. The medicine cabinet door is swung open, various boxes and pill bottles sprawled into the sink below it. His injured hand hangs at his side, away from his body, and you examine the blood dripping off his fingertips as he fumbles with the fastener on the roll of gauze.

A concerned cube bounces from outside and races between your feet, it’s shrill voice echoing in the small room—“Noiz, you need medical attention! Medical attention!”—and the brat claims he’s fine. You watch as he finally pulls the fastener clip from the cloth, but he struggles with wrapping it around his palm, his sliced hand involuntarily shaking as the blood continues to pool on the ivory white tiles below his feet.

You take a long stride forward and take his wrist in your hand, pulling it toward yourself as you take the lengthy bandage from him and kneel onto the ground. He begins to speak out in indignation, but you tell him to be quiet, examining the wound carefully. It’s bad, and it’s deep enough to require stitches, so you work to wrap the cloth snugly around his hand, tight enough to temporarily stop the bleeding.

Without glancing up you can assume that he’s still angry with you, now for a multitude of reasons, his expression likely disgruntled, dark, threatening. If you weren’t so focused on not worsening the injury you’d probably snort at his childishness.

Grabbing the small scissors from the kit you cut off the excess cloth, fastening it and placing the scissors back, then lift the box from his lap in one hand before you stand up and pull him up by the arm with the other.

In frustration he shouts at you, trying to argue with you to let go and it only serves to make your grip tighter. All you say is that he’s going to the nearest hospital, leading him around the corner to the entryway, removing your grip on his forearm to allow him to put on his shoes. Initially, he makes no move as you sit to pull on your boots, but you command him to hurry up, and he reluctantly obeys, stepping into his shoes and looping the long laces around his ankles.

You don’t wait any longer than you need to. The distressed cube Allmate hops on the ground before leaping into the awaiting, non-injured palm of its owner when you swing the front door open. He presses onto the face of the cube—sleep mode, you assume—and settles him on top of the coat rack shelf before he follows with the door shut behind him, and you hold some small satisfaction that he’s finally listening to you, albeit begrudgingly.

The two of you speed down the stairs, his steps echoing your own just like they had when he pursued you back to that crumbling building. It’s ridiculous, this entire situation—his fascination with you or something you have has led the both of you to this moment, racing to your motorcycle as the bandage soaks up the blood oozing from his wound every second.

Reaching the bottom and getting closer to the motorcycle you note that he has fallen silent, ghosting your path as you straddle the seat of the motorbike; he follows suit, his body barely fitting on the back of it. The bike rumbles to life after you twist the key, and the instant you ride out of the parking space he hurriedly encircles an arm around your waist.

As you drive into the center of town, towards the East District, the kid settled behind you with his chest pushing against your back, he squeezes your torso just slightly, and you think that even if he doesn’t physically feel it the same way you do, he takes some comfort in your touch.

* * *

 

Being one of the only hospitals operating on the island, it is overrun with patients, doctors and nurses scrambling between floors to tend to those recovering from the mental strain of being trapped in the hold of Morphine and to those coming out of nasty Rib fights breaking out over territory. The wait for getting into the ER is stressful; the room is loud, incredibly so, and all the reverberating sound beats into your eardrums, giving you a headache.

The room the nurse takes the two of you in is substantially less hectic, a quiet aura settling over the small enclosure as the doctor pulls the maniac aside to investigate the extent of the damage. You watch from the other side of the room, seated on a padded bench and leaning your back on the wall with your arms crossed over your chest, as the doctor threads a needle though his patient’s flesh. The kid looks at the process with mild fascination, and it’s so surreal to you in how he doesn’t flinch whatsoever, hardly feeling anything, and knowing that it isn’t the work of anesthetic.

You leave with him in tow after the doctor tells him to return in two weeks time to get the sutures removed, the injured extremity now wrapped in fresh, pristine white gauze, unstained from the blood of the wound. The entire way back to the lobby, to the front door, to the parking lot you can feel his eyes staring a hole in the back of your head, but you aren’t sure what he’s thinking, not at first.

When you take to straddling the bike’s seat, he joins you as soon as you’re settled and wraps both his arms around your torso again. As you leisurely ride back to the apartment, the wind brushes your bare arms and you can feel the evening air cooling as you reach the outskirts of the neighborhoods. He grows more impatient, tightening his hold around you, his hot breaths seeping through the cotton of your t-shirt and you’re certain of what he wants to do when you take him home.

* * *

 

By the time the two of you make it back to the building—standing tall and unbroken, unlike the one you’ve returned to for so long—the sun has nearly set entirely, darkening skies stained indigo as a fading vermillion glows at the horizon. You throw the kickstand with your heel and once you’re both off the vehicle, the maniac grabs your wrist, leading you up the stairs in a way that is so similar to what you had done to him, and the reflection makes you smirk in amusment at his eagerness.

The second you close the front door, he slams you against it, your back hitting the wooden surface with a heavy thud, and kisses you with fervor as he crumples your shirt in his right hand, his left in the process of healing only hanging stiffly at his side. You respond easily, sliding your tongue along his while you press a hand at his lower back, bringing him in closer and grinding his hips into yours.

Payment is probably a disingenuous way of looking at it, but you can’t help the thrill you feel traveling up your spine as he thrusts his tongue down your throat, and you think that in the moment you’re okay with the give-and-take nature of your relationship.

You still have a few burning questions, though, so you test your suspicions on his tongue—dragging your teeth on the tip, flicking the ring piercing on the underside, rolling the silver ball at the top—before giving it a gentle but sharp bite. He reacts instantly, his back muscles shuddering as he lets out a tiny hiss, and it’s the setting off point for him.

Taking you with him, he stumbles backward—nearly tripping on the genkan—to lead you in the direction of his bedroom, the door still ajar from earlier. You support his weight as he pulls back from the kiss, coordinating between blindly taking reversed steps and leaning forward to peck at your lips a few times, and within the gaps you ask if he can feel pain in his tongue, to which he hums in affirmation. You aren’t surprised.

Once the two of you are through the narrow doorway, he pivots your body around and you remove the hand on his back before he shoves you toward the bed. The back of your knees hit the edge and you fall back, landing on it in a rush, and your vision floods with the ceiling of the darkened room. You note that this is the first time you’ve ever stepped foot in here—where he sleeps, where he sulks and avoids you—and you remember that this, or at least something very close, was what he was aiming for when he invited you in the first place.

The sight of the ceiling is replaced with his face, and even in the dim light passing through the large uncovered window, you can see the pale green of his irises, framed in the intense, upturned shape of his eyelids as he stares down at you. He lowers himself, his body fully flushed on top of yours; the weight of his torso is a sensation that you hadn’t realized you were craving. He licks lightly at your jaw, nibbling as he makes his way to your earlobe, and fumbles with your belt buckle with a single hand. You aid him, undoing the latch before moving to unzip his pants and pull his dick from his underwear; it’s already beginning to harden as you hold it.

Within seconds he has taken yourself out of your jeans—the release ridding you of that suffocating feeling—and you exhale through your nose as your cock rests along your bare hip, gradually swelling at the exposure to the open air while you begin stroking him. You watch him, concentrating on the heated, almost feverish look gloss over his features from the corner of your eye. He pushes up the hem of your t-shirt, sliding a flat hand across your abdomen, and then he’s pulling your hand off of himself, shoving his lower body onto yours and starts to grind against you with a roll in his hips.

Your hands snake underneath his shirt, pushing the fabric up to his ribcage, before they stop at his waist, the tips of your fingers ghosting the contours of his lean muscles as you buck upwards, rubbing your dick against the numerous piercings on his own. At your sternum, your moans vibrate through your skin to meet his own; you faintly think about how he probably can’t even sense it, and the fact is only slightly disappointing.

As the two of you continue, your bodies create an unsteady, sloppy rhythm that becomes more laborious to keep up as the movements are worked faster. All of it—teeth tugging at the shell of your ear, breaths spilling into your eardrums, hand pushing at your abdomen, fingers digging into your skin—is too much. Already, you’re close, painfully close, and so you shift a hand from his waist to his cock, dragging your nails along the shaft as he ruts forward.

Knowing now, fully understanding, that his lack of reactions and his need for rough, almost unkind treatment during sex being the result of an under-sensitive nervous system is almost enlightening, and everything—the slice in his palm, the incessant kissing, being unafraid of you—makes sense, all in perfect clarity in your mind.

You’re finally able to read him as well as you should.

The scraping is working well, your fingers catching the piercings every time he thrusts, and you listen as his breathing becomes more stunted, halted as it combines with your own uneven grunts reverberating from your chest. He gives up on assaulting your ear, his muscles growing weak as he lies all of his upper body weight onto you, but he continues his hurried grinding against your skin. Both of you mirror each others movements, arching your backs as hips meet hips, and soon you’re at your peak, finding release when you come with a gasp, cloudy liquid shooting onto his hand and barely missing your shirt.

He finishes a few thrusts after, his face buried in your neck while his entire body shivers above you. Your fingers are also covered in come, but neither of you move, just lying in a disheveled, sweaty pile as you both attempt to catch your breath. It ends as abruptly as it all started, messy and heated, and you wonder how long you actually took—if it was as quick as it felt.

He’s the first to move, pushing himself off of your chest with his elbows. You glance over, examining the color of the bandage on his hand, but you find no indication of further injury, the fabric still a ghostly white. As preoccupied as you were, you hadn’t thought to assure the safety of his left hand, but he must have taken care not to aggravate the wound.

Reaching over to one of the end tables, you pull a few tissues from a small box before sitting up. He leans back and settles on your thighs, his dick peeking out of his underwear, pants still undone, thermal riding up his torso, and to you the image of both of you looking this way is absurd, lewd. You clean him up, wiping off the fluids that stuck to his stomach, and it’s the first time he doesn’t object to you touching him first. He tries to take a clean tissue from you, but knowing he won’t be able to use his other hand much at all you continue with cleaning the mess you made on his knuckles.

When you’re finished he grabs a tissue anyway and returns the favor as he wipes both your abdomen and your hand, saying nothing in the process. You watch him carefully, but he’s unaffected from your gaze as he finishes up, taking both of the dirtied tissues and tossing them into the small trash bin by the door. He pushes you back down before flipping onto his back and lying beside you, putting himself back into his clothing as you do the same.

For a long minute no words pass between you. The only sounds hanging in the room are the mingling of his breaths with yours, staring up at the ceiling as the heavy air settles over your bodies.

He’s the first to speak, asking you with a simple “why,” and the request is so vague that you need him to clarify—there are so many “why”s to the actions you make, to the words you use that he could be asking you for nearly anything.

He asks, “Why did you help me?” and it’s a question you do not know the answer to. As you stood in the doorway—watching him struggle with the gauze, the blood trickling onto the restroom floor, his hand shaking not in pain but in involuntary panic—you didn’t think about your behavior, couldn’t take the time to, and lying next to him you realize your motivations are unknown even to you.

So you tell him that he was too incapable to mend it himself, and that he was an idiot for trying to refuse your assistance in the first place. He rolls his head in your direction, but you only watch the movement from the corner of your eyes. The fool would not have made it to the hospital without any method of transportation, and seeing how stubborn he becomes when injured, he might have even tried to walk all the way to the East District on his own.

He’s horribly independent—just like you—and you remember how he stuck with you that entire time in Platinum Jail; he always stayed behind with you, letting the other two lead the way as they searched for a way into the tower. It’s likely that, in regards to the others, he felt the same way you do: the hot-blooded man in red being too territorial, too possessive, too quick to anger to properly work with, and the man wearing the gas mask too obnoxious, too excitable to the point of him being insufferable to be around.

This maniac, despite his insubordination, his self-centered attitude, his cockiness in and outside of sex, is the most likeable out of the three. He’s considerably quiet—though often abrasive in his speech—and even when he was reprimanding you for dragging him out of the toilet his voice never got too loud; he’s difficult to truly anger, and, aside from what happened just a few hours ago, only grows annoyed at the nickname you’ve given him. He’s complicated, a puzzle for you to solve, but his company isn’t bad. The sex is good, too.

And that’s all it is: just sex, nothing else.

There’s a pause, and it’s almost as if he was reluctant to accept your response, but he seemingly pushes it aside, turning his head to face upwards again. He doesn’t press further on the matter; however, his next question throws you a bit off-guard; he wants to know why you helped Aoba.

That—what you wanted with Aoba—is something you can completely lay out and pick at, an alternate plan where every minute detail had been illustrated in your mind; he was your ultimate trump card. However, you hadn’t anticipated the fool running off on his own with only that outdated Allmate at his side, and you think bitterly at your failure to get to the tower yourself, to the man who destroyed nearly every semblance of your existence when he took your family away from you.

You say that he was your ticket to Oval Tower, to Toue, but you leave it at that and tell him nothing more. While it’s true, that that’s all you needed him to be—a tool, something for you to use—you didn’t intend to even remotely become attached to him. The pure look of joy and relief on his face, the one he shined at you when he saw that the four of you came to his aid, still sits in the back of your mind, and there’s a twisting feeling in your gut when you recall the image.

Sometimes, when you rest your eyes, you dream about the softness of his skin, the sweetness of his voice, and you wonder about a future the two of you could have had if your circumstances weren’t so ugly and malformed.

The kid doesn’t prod at your answer, but there must have been a glint in your eyes, perhaps a wistfulness forming in your brows, because he replies with how Aoba got to you, too, and there’s a color in his voice that isn’t sadness, but rather disappointment. You weren’t without your suspicions for the other two and their own incentives, their own motives for going after him, so eager to see him again, to touch him and cradle his beaten body to safety, but the one beside you must have been simply better at hiding it.

He’s says something about how he keeps in contact with him, stopping by the shop occasionally whenever he’s working on a shift, but you hardly listen out of consideration for your own undesired curiosities until he mentions Toue again, inquiring what you wanted from the late man so personally.

What a loaded question.

But it’s the way he asked you, sounding so disinterested while he glances back over at you, that makes you hesitate to offer even the condensed version. He waits for a few seconds, yet you don’t open your mouth to speak, and so he elaborates on why he’s curious—how it was difficult to like the guy to begin with, but the way your face looked whenever he was mentioned made it seem like you held a grudge.

He’s sharp, intelligent, and you had nearly forgotten through all his flaws that he’s also quite perceptive. In your silence he’s still staring at you, and you bring yourself to start that it is because of Toue that you are alone, why everyone you cared for and loved growing up are now gone.

For a beat you say nothing else, but soon you continue with that you were going to commit suicide now that your target had died, were it not for him following you just a few weeks ago. You think at first he isn’t fully absorbing your words, but from the edge of your vision you see him take a silent but deep exhale, and you’re sure you’ve antagonized him again. Lowly, with what almost sounds like anger lining his voice, he states that you’re still alive.

A familiar bitterness fills your bones and you just tell him that no, you died in the flames that the last of your tribe perished in. You’re being honest—something you haven’t been to him, not really—and the wounds are so old that they don’t even hurt anymore; all they do to you now is make you feel tired. You’ve been a dead man walking for so many years that you’ve lost count of how long it has truly been, and the only emotion you know anymore is exhaustion.

You feel bandaged fingers curling around your wrist, and you roll your head to the side to look at the person touching you. When he speaks, his words hit you like a ton of bricks.

“That’s fucking stupid. Just because I can barely feel you doesn’t mean I can’t tell you’re alive.”

For the first time, he looks at you with conviction, brows set heavy over his eyes as they bore into your skull, and his determined gaze rattles your core, suddenly and without mercy. His choice of diction is hardly elegant—in fact his swear just making it vulgar—but his claim isn’t without meaning, and you can feel it. You’re reminded of how young he really is, so quick to tell you what he thinks like he was offended by what you said. You’ve never seen him so genuine, frown deepening as he looks straight at you and not through you, his smooth face highlighted by the bright moonlight softly shining through the window, features ruined by the piercings you’ve only ever seen on disorderly youth just like him.

His hold on you is uncomfortable; it’s making your throat tighten, and you’re unsure of the face you’re wearing. You feel like you’ve lost control of yourself—as if he has taken it—and it terrifies you.

You pull your arm away and he does not persist as you withdrawal from his grasp. In a state of uneasiness, you climb out the bed, the frame faintly squeaking as your weight is lifted from it, and leave the room, his watching you making you taste vulnerability in your dry mouth. The door closes with a laggard click, your senses almost perceiving it as too loud in the unbearable silence surrounding you; you can’t hear anything from the other side, and you’re unable to distinguish the relief or the anxiety from that fact.

Navigating through the dark apartment with only the moonlight as your guide, you pull the lighter and the pipe from your coat pocket as it hangs loosely on the hook, the tobacco inside the chamber only half-smoked, and turn back to step out on the empty veranda. You stand tall near the edge, the guard wall stopping right at your waist, overlooking the distant lights of the homes before you, resting in the dark light as a reflection of the starry skies you used to view in the North District.

You light the pipe gingerly. The pungent taste of the smoke settles on your tongue and you relish in the familiarity of it while you try to decipher why, despite the headache pounding at your brain, you feel so much lighter than before.


	4. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love, it was enough to recognize  
> To see I was the reason you feel sick inside
> 
> [ _Fall in love._ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W97JLBc7C8k)

You awake the next morning to the smell of brewing coffee. For a few long minutes, eyes closed and limbs unmoving, you’re seven years-old again, listening as your mother softly clatters the mugs in the kitchen not far from your bedroom, your father likely outside of the cabin, taking a drag on his pipe while he sits on the porch stairs. The morning sun peeks through the curtains of your window, and you can hear the distant birds singing as you lay down, enveloped in the warmth of the blanket your grandmother weaved herself. You know that when you blink your eyes you’ll be welcomed by the dark, warm wooden walls of the home you’ve spent your short, little life in.

Tiredly lifting your eyelids, however, you’re met with the cold white ceiling of a home belonging to someone else. You lift your sleep-heavy head from the armrest, your feet elevated by the armrest on the opposite side, and absentmindedly ponder how poorly lit the apartment is as you rotate your body to sit up on the sofa. A quick glance to the left you see the kid prepare breakfast on the stovetop, his back facing you as he shuffles something on a skillet while fresh coffee drips slowly into a considerably large glass pot in the corner of the counters.

He doesn’t seem to be aware that you’ve woken up—you’re grateful—and turning your head over your shoulder you see the bird still perched on the back of the sofa. You rub at your eyes, pushing with the pads of your fingers in an attempt to rid yourself of the fatigue pulling you back to sleep. Standing up quietly, you stroke your thumb between Tori’s eyes; he starts up with a gentle chime, and you walk to the toilet while your fingers pull the contacts case from its place in your pants pocket.

You’re trying to be discreet as you move past the kitchen, not looking over at your host when you push the door handle and step into the small restroom. The door closes with a soft thud and you’re sure you heard a brief pause of a scraping spatula before you pressed it flat against the frame, the sound resuming as you place the contact case on the rim of the sink. With a few handfuls of water you wash your face and then clean your hands, avoiding the reflection of yourself in the mirror.

When you twist the contact case open and dab at the left cup, the translucent jungle green lens balanced atop your fingertip, you ask yourself why you continue to wear these. With your target dead, there is truly no remaining reason for you to even be breathing, much less wearing a disguise when you have no one to fool anymore. That maniac is the only person to have routinely seen you since the fall of the tower, and for as long as your Allmate has been resting on your shoulder he has never seen you without the colored masks on your irises.

Placing the lens on your left eye, you drift your vision to the mirror in front of you—one eye teal, one eye golden—and the person looking back at you is someone you don’t know, not anymore. The image you watch is a perfect representation of your identity, split from two people that explain the word “you,” two people that you’re losing your grasp on. You are trapped in a sort of limbo, stuck between two images of yourself where one has been nearly lost, forgotten, and the other no longer serving any substantial purpose.

But the kid in the other room is, you think, one reason to uphold this coarse, rough, hardened version of yourself and you press the accompanying lens in your right eye with practiced ease, your reflection now even and symmetrical.

Prior to today, when you followed your daily routine—dressed in greys and blacks, accessorizing with the minimal amount of color, wearing colored contact lenses—you would feel a sense of comfort within the persona you created for yourself. But now carrying your form in the skin of the violent, unforgiving man everyone knows you as, you’re suddenly strained, as if the clothes you’re wearing aren’t yours, contacts feeling foreign on your cornea like they haven’t been there thousands of times before.

Your bones feel lighter, and there’s a new, unfamiliar weight building in your heart that you don’t know how to get rid of.

With some resentment, you twist the lids of the case shut and put the plastic container in your pocket before opening the door again. Stepping out, Tori flies to you and perches onto your shoulder, the action familiar, his presence being something you’re used to, and you mull over the clashing comfort and unease you’re submerged in.

You peer into the kitchen, the maniac eating breakfast while seated at the island, a second plate loaded with a surprisingly Western meal of eggs, bacon, toast and a mug of coffee across from him. When you sit down, he doesn’t look up at you, and instead blankly stares at the plate as he finishes the remaining half of his food mutely. He isn’t acknowledging you, but he isn’t pretending that you aren’t there—the meal he prepared being proof of that—and without saying anything to him you know he wouldn’t respond if you did.

The food is decent, not particularly good nor bad, when you take the first taste of the eggs. This isn’t different to the multiple times the two of you have eaten in silence, but there’s something in the air, a looming sense of tension as he avoids noticing your company, and it’s not like the suspense you felt yesterday after you touched him outside of his initiative.

He's fully dressed this morning, covered in the usual mints and navies, the long sleeves of his black thermal stretched over his arms as the studded cuffs rest loosely on his wrists. His hair is mussed underneath his hat, fringe poking out the front in sharp locks right above his brows, and he looks almost nothing like the person who gazed at you with such determination the night prior.

Before you can decide if you should break the stillness in the room, he bites the last of his toast and steps off of the stool with the emptied plate in hand. He settles the plate neatly into the sink basin, then circles the counter quietly, and you watch as he quickly glances at you over his shoulder before disappearing into the hallway.

He didn't look at you with angered eyes, didn't seem disapproving or annoyed, and said nothing to you at all, not even with that expressionless face. Halted in your eating you listen from the other side of the wall, faint sounds of fumbling and then the swinging of the front door before it being slammed closed.

It was odd, his leaving without a word, not even to tell you to come back later or even just to leave altogether. Tori muses out loud, remarking at the strangeness of the kid’s behavior, and you say nothing in return as you stare at the bare wall, thinking. He’s likely keeping his distance after the events of yesterday—the prick of his lip piercings on your jaw, the curl of his fingers on your skin, the piercing look in his eyes, the low whisper of his voice—and you remind yourself that it’s just sex, remind yourself that sex is all it should be.

His scent—powder, soap, lavender, rejection—still lingers in the air surrounding you, and you sigh as you stab the pile of scrambled eggs with the fork. You decide that, because he didn’t tell you to leave, you’ll wait until he comes back, and suddenly you’re very aware of how frequently your heart beats under your ribs.

* * *

 

At first, all you do is place your plate and mug on top of the other dishes in the sink, then browse the news on your Coil. He doesn’t return within the next couple hours, so you busy yourself by cleaning the plates, the pans, the forks in the sink and leaving them to dry on the dish rack, reheating the coffee from earlier while you work. You sweep and gather the crumbs from the counters into your cupped hand to toss them into the trash bin. When you step on the lever to lift the lid, however, you’re met with an overabundance of garbage, composed mainly of flattened take-out boxes and crumbled plastic wrap used for frozen pizza.

Every time he brought food back to the old building up north, it was always purchased from some kind of restaurant or vendor, and at the time you thought little of it; take-out is quick, effortless, easy to dispose. Looking down at the bin filled to the brim with the same boxes and wrappers you wonder how the brat is so lean when all he seems to eat is processed foods, and you then realize how unused this entire apartment is.

He never seems to be home. Everything is clean, yes, but nothing appears worn down, stainless steel glimmering and granite counter tops gleaming without a single scratch, scuff, or stain. When you finished washing the dishes left over from breakfast, the wooden dish rack was completely empty. All of his remaining dishes sit in the cabinets, and you test your suspicion with a swipe of your thumb after throwing the crumbs away. The surface of the square-shaped mug—one in a matching set of four—is grimy, and when you pull away your skin is coated with a thin layer of dust.

There’s an overwhelming lack of age in this spacious suite, and with everything this brat owns and enjoys, with how old he is, you try to consider what it is about you that he finds even remotely fascinating. Mulling it over as you turn around to go into his bedroom, no conclusion you’ve come to aligns with the demeanor he carries and the behavior he displays.

You survey the bedsheets—off-white, Egyptian cotton—as they lay crumpled, wrinkled in a mass atop the mattress. Near the bottom, where the fabric is predominately still flat, several dirty scuff marks are left over from the hurried session the night before, where neither of you took the time to remove your shoes. Looking at the angles of the darkened lines on the otherwise clean sheet, you’re unsure of whose shoes left which marks.

As you remove the pillows from the bed and stack them beside the end table, you consider how cleaning up his apartment, particularly his room, is an intrusion on his privacy. His reaction would probably be ugly; questioning your motives and clutching your arm with his nails—until he knows that it’s painful—so he can get answers from you. You pull the bed sheet and fold it sloppily, then toss it on the ground with the pillows before lifting the mattress to peel off the fitted sheet.

The size of the bed is a standard European king, too large for a single person of his size, and you wonder if he’s ever brought anyone else back home. When he told you he was clean in the old Scratch building, you hadn’t thought he wasn’t and he isn’t, but the proclamation makes you reconsider his personality and how he perceives others. Every time you’ve fucked, it was nothing more than a physical thing; if he’s bedded anyone else, it was likely the same thing the two of you have been repeating for several weeks, a fulfillment of carnal desires, a form of physical intimacy without strings.

You’re both very good at using people.

Taking the cases off of each pillow, you gather them with the rest of the bedspread piled onto the floor and walk back outside, headed for the small closet adjacent to the bathroom. When you pull the shuttered door open, you’re greeted by a small enclosure, no bigger than four square feet, encompassing a simple washing machine—shiny and new, just like everything in this suite—and simple shelving cascading on the wall beside it. Flipping the light switch, you see that there’s hardly anything in here, either; detergent, spare towels, a extra bedspread, and clothes pins are the only things sitting on the shelves.

This entire apartment feels barren, as if the objects—counters, furniture, appliances, necessities—occupying the large space hardly exist at all; it feels empty, as if it belongs to no one, as if it isn’t the place where even one person comes back to everyday. Despite all its glamor, its polish, this apartment reminds you eerily of the North District.

Lifting the hefty lid, you toss the bedsheets into the washer and pour a small cup of powdered laundry detergent before running the high-pressured water, icy jets against your knuckles when you check the temperature. Softly dropping the lid back down, you pull down the thickened stack of bedsheets from the shelf, inhaling the scent to check for its cleanliness, and take it with you back to the bedroom.

As you pull the fitted sheet around the bed, you wonder why he doesn’t use this set of navy blues and blacks over the slate grey spread currently spinning in the washer when he’s so focused on color coordination in his daily wear—even down to his socks and his underwear, you remember—and when it’s actually softer to the touch. Then you realize your offhanded mistake on the second part.

You grunt at the thought, tucking the fabric over the last corner when you quickly check the time on your Coil. It’s been over three hours with no sign of him, already past midday, and you have no indication of when he’ll come back or if he even would with you still loitering in his home.

If he wanted you to leave, he would have kicked you out himself.

He’s keeping you around for something, and the easy answer to his reasoning would be the sex, but you know it isn’t so menial, not with the way his eyes pierced you yesterday, not with the way his fingers clung around your wrist, not with the way he spoke with such determination. You’re loathe to admit it, but the words he unknowingly weighed upon you are changing you; not in ways that are obvious, ways seen by just looking at you, but rather in the lightness of your shoulders, the horrible awareness of the heart beating beneath your ribcage, and the blood rhythmically pumping in your veins.

The weight has been lifted from your arms and you’ve never felt so similar to a feather, but the one in your sternum only feels even heavier as the day goes by, and you hate the implications of it.

In your head you replay this morning, when he went past to the other side of the wall. The look he gave you held no traces of anger; he didn’t appear like he usually did, that tired, bored, uninterested face you’ve grown to know him for; and he almost seemed hurt, if anything, features strained in a way that someone with no understanding of physical pain can manifest. He hesitated before turning away, and you wonder if he was about to say something, anything to you.

You want him to come back, to tell you why he had so suddenly leaped to refute your claim regarding your perspective on your own life and then pulling back without any persistence. The idea of wanting him to return to you—the phrasing of it—makes a bitter laugh force itself out of your throat as you throw the pillows back onto the head of the bed, neatly encased to match the rest of the bedspread. You smooth out the top sheet like you’ve never done with the cot you’ve gone back to for several years and fold the comforter back up before slipping it underneath the bed frame.

A dull, resonating pain pulses in your skull and you massage your temple as you leave the bedroom, softly shutting the door as you pass the entryway. Heading for the sofa, the bird flies at your form from his place at the top of the refrigerator and lands on the backrest, perching proudly as you stretch out over the cushions. The two of you share a glance shortly before you shut your eyes to rest for a few moments.

The shroud of darkness is comforting and you let your mind swim in the welcoming solace in a feeble attempt to ease your headache as it pounds relentlessly at your forehead. The ambiance of the washing machine tumbling from the other side of the room and the faint clicking of a beak preening at feathers are the only sounds echoing through your ears; it’s a pleasant change from the deafening silence you were sitting in prior, and you’re thankful that the blinds were left undrawn from this morning.

* * *

 

However, when you open your eyes again the sunlight peeking from under the blinds is an intense but pale gold tone, and you are glad that, in your recklessness, your contacts have not caused any irritation due to your unexpected nap. Tori sits on your stomach, looking down at you as he intermittently twitches his wings. With a poke at your chest with his beak he tells you that the washing machine has stopped, and the domesticity of the entire situation in your sleep-addled state is so surreal that you can only stare at him for a few moments.

He hops off of your body after sharing a brief staring contest with you and glides into the kitchen, making some muttered remark over your lack of eating—he could hear your stomach growling—and asks if you’re going to eat any of the maniac’s food. You curl your body upward to sit up, feeling better than when you nodded off, and you don’t answer the Allmate as you push yourself off of the sofa to take out the bedsheets.

The sheets are still saturated with water when you pull up the heavy bundle, and you wring out as much of the extra liquid as you need to prevent it from soaking the floor when you walk out onto the open veranda. Taking a few clothes pins in your palm, you leave the modest closet and, with a swipe at the switch, the shaded hanging lamp flickers off with a faint hum. You grip onto the thin rod at the sliding doors, jabbing it sideways to push aside the blinds, and the movement reveals the outside bright and lively, an almost painful contrast to the dim and stagnant aura of the room you stand in.

Stepping out on the veranda, the wind sweeps your hair forcefully, tossing your dreadlocks forward and obscuring your sight enough to give you tunnel vision. In annoyance you toss the bedspread with the pins onto the single, isolated outdoor chair shoved into a corner beside the door before taking two locks from your nape, and then pulling them upward to tie your hair back, twisting the ropes into a knot.

Tori flies out through the door, landing soundly onto the top surface of the half wall, and he watches as you pull the clothesline across the deck, stretching it from wall to wall in a taut row of wires. You can’t remember the last time you hung laundry out to dry—perhaps when you were a child—but it’s refreshing, in a way, doing something so commonplace and mundane in a building that isn’t crumbling at the seams. Everything about yourself feels different; not new or transformed, but rather restored, your form carrying an old, familiar shape that is distinctly yours. Doing laundry makes you feel at ease again.

You clasp the fitted sheet onto the clothes line, the wires suspended just above your head as you snap the pin into place. The wind picks up as you pull the opposite corner to meet the wire, cloth waving relentlessly in your grasp, and you almost lose hold of it as you work. Mulling on it, you hadn’t thought to check the forecast for the day. Craning your neck upward and leaning back, peeking past neighboring wall that blocks your view, you observe the clouds beginning to cascade the skies in a heavy, darkening tone as they slowly creep near the island.

Tilting your head in the Allmate’s direction, you request the weather and after a short pause he plainly relays the forecast to you: scattered but light rainstorms from late afternoon to late evening. Already, with a quick study of the shadows casting by the lowering sun, you can tell without a clock that time is inching closer to nightfall. It’s possible that the storm will miss the town entirely—hitting Platinum Jail, nothing else—and that the winds won’t carry any rain toward the veranda as the clouds are floating just on the west edge of the small island.

Which would be preferable, or else taking the time to dry the bedsheets you took hand in dirtying would be for an effort wasted.

You work diligently in a race with the wind to hang up the two pillow cases before the gusts change their orientation and throw the cloth right into your face. From behind you, you hear the bird chuckle while you almost wrestle with the last case as it flaps hopelessly in the air, and soon he’s flown up in front of you, taking the bottom hem of the cloth and pulling it downward to hold it in place for you. As you shift the corner of the case to the clothesline and pin it, you grunt in what he’ll understand as a gesture of casual thanks on your part before double-checking each pin to ensure the security of the bedspread.

Walking back inside with the bird rushing past before you slide the glass door shut, you listen as a palpable silence settles thickly around you, not a single sound coming from inside the apartment; the only noise you can hear is the sharp whine of wind trying to breach through the cracks of the window frames. There isn’t a lean body curled on the couch, no slouched shoulders standing in the kitchen, no muffled breathing that isn’t your own, and you shouldn’t have expected him to come back before nightfall.

Untangling the knot you made in your hair, you sit down onto the sofa—frame too new to squeak under your weight—and let the locks rest on the sides of your face again, unable to shake the discomfort of staying in the home of someone who isn’t there.

* * *

 

You’re in the middle of brewing another cup of coffee when you hear a tiny, distressed cry from the other side of the wall. It’s a familiar voice—shrill, tinny—as it interrupts your thoughts on what to eat for dinner, but the words it shouts from the entryway are too obstructed for you to discern what exactly it’s saying. Closing the fridge door, you take long strides into the front hallway, and with the ceiling lamp turned off all you can see at the end is a jumping, pale green glow coming from the coat rack.

In your haste, the hopping, panicked cube takes shape in your vision as you adjust to the lighting. You hear it cry out with clarity—“Noiz receives massive damage! He is incapacitated!”—and the last word repeats as you reach out for the small Allmate. You’re nerved by the disconnect between the dismayed voice and the plain, blank expression on the face of the weighted block, reminded of its owner, your brow furrowing as you listen on. You instantly register what the bot means when it continues with the maniac’s status as unresponsive, and all you can ask is the word “where.”

This isn’t an automatic process for the Allmate, an instruction that it is programed to do—this is a cry for help.

Letting go of his forgotten cube as you kneel in a rush to put on your boots, it floats unsteadily in the air and is quickly met by your own Allmate, grand and organic beside the simple and geometric block. The rabbit cube dances in a jittery manner as it discloses the location of its owner, Tori at first facing the cube before turning to you while you finish tying the remaining shoe, saying that he’ll go looking without you having to ask. You throw on your coat after tearing it from its place on the hook, threading your arms through the sleeves; this is the first time you’ve ever put it on in such a panic. When you open the door the bird immediately takes flight forward, headed for the South District, and you shove the block into your breast pocket, pressed firmly against the pipe resting inside.

The second you step outside, the humid air pours into your lungs and it almost feels like drowning. The tiny Allmate resumes the reading of its owner’s state, listing off numbers and terms in a language you don’t know, its metallic voice muted against your chest. You are so wrapped into the urgency of the moment that you hadn’t taken to a single thought the entire time you’ve hurriedly left to speed down the metal stairs, footsteps ringing painfully in your ears as you carry the distraught cube with you.

Why are you doing this? Why are you clamoring your way to the parking lot? Why has your throat trapped your breathing? Why do you have a sickly weight filling your gut? You don’t know.

You don’t know, but you know your heart is beating too fast.

Straddling the bike, you twist the key in the ignition and the vehicle rumbles to life, the vibrations shooting through your body that were once a welcoming sensation now only making you unsettled further. You pull out of the space loudly, the growling engine and the screech of the tires echoing across the complexes, but with your mind so removed from the environment it all sounds distant to you. From the top of the hills, you can see a pink speckle ahead of you, wings flapping delicately as the bird aids your search, and there’s something within your core that swells at the simple image.

He—that brat—wouldn’t have refrained from speaking to you since this morning and then called for your help if he didn’t truly, deeply need it. His distress call isn’t enough to tell you what exactly has happened—the details you need simply not given—yet there is no misunderstanding for the urgency of his message. All you know is that he is what the cube considers to be “incapacitated,” but to what extent has only been relayed in statistics, repetitive numbers and proportions that are useless to you.

You’re losing your equanimity, the composure you’re so well known for by your old subordinates and the small few that you’ve met only recently—the one in the red kimono, the one wearing that gas mask, the one decked in mints and blacks, the one covered in blues—and for the first time in several years, you aren’t sure if you can keep hold of it for much longer.

You’re left in the dark and all you can do is imagine what happened until you get there yourself.

As much as the idiot aggravates you, you can’t ignore his plea—be it directly from him or just as an alert from his Allmate. He’s still young, an estranged youth that, while you don’t have nearly anything from his upbringing to work with, still has some kind of path to veer towards. You may not be a man without sin, a man with something to live for, but you aren’t one to let someone you know just fall apart, to die if there is a way for you to prevent it.

* * *

 

That weight in your sternum grows heavier the longer you take to get to the South District. Soon, when you reach the outskirts, the bird alerts your Coil with the kid’s location, and the cool, misty air brushes your cheeks as you navigate through the maze-like structure of this part of town. With the thick atmosphere enfolding your body, you think that it may not rain at all, fog already falling in its place to flood the island in a blanket of vapor.

Turning corner after corner, it doesn’t take much longer for you to reach the abandoned side street, pink feathers peeking out plainly as the bird perches on a fire escape of a brick building in the empty passage, directing your attention with the outstretch of his wings. You dismount the bike, turning it off as you flip the kickstand. The small Allmate in your pocket jitters, aware of the changed environment and exclaims for its owner from underneath the coat’s sturdy fabric. You leave it be; there’s no point in letting it out, not yet.

With long strides you make it over to him, his form sitting up with his back against a wall at the edge of a enshrouded alleyway, his head limply hanging near his shoulder, shoulders slumping forward as his limbs lay slackened on the concrete. It’s strange, but seeing no sign of physical injury on his person calms you, your heart rate beginning to steady as you give him a quick once-over; there’s no blood seeping from his skin, no bruises purpling at the surface.

You get closer, and once you’ve kneeled down beside him you study his face; he looks pale, more than he usually does, and his eyes look so vacant, so shallow, so eerily similar to the manipulated members of Morphine. You know, however, that this isn’t the influence of the late Toue; this is the ugly consequence of a Rhyme malfunction, something you’ve heard of but never seen. It was a rumor you overheard your own teammates discussing regarding an error in Drive-bys, yet it wasn’t of your concern, not at the time, and you hardly paid it any mind.

Now, however, you can’t ignore it.

You don’t think as you take his Coil from his person. You don’t think as you scroll through the list of contacts to find the one individual who can fix this. You don’t think as you dial the number. You don’t have time to weigh your options, to decide is there’s some kind of alternative, someone else to do this, and you only wait through a few rings before the face of Aoba flickers onto the screen. He answers, greeting with a name that isn’t yours, then blinking as he realizes who he’s speaking to.

He’s confused—not expecting to see you at all—and he tries to ask, tries to figure out why you’re calling him from the maniac’s Coil instead of your own, but you cut him short. You practically bark orders at him, commanding more than requesting for his aid, telling him that you’re going to send him a message with an attached address. At first he’s bewildered, and all he can ask is a simple but all-encompassing “why.” With a flick of your finger, you flip the hologram to face the one resting beside you, and you can hear the sharp intake of breath from Aoba as he soaks in the picture of the hollowed-out maniac.

In a small voice he calls out to him, but you twist the monitor back to yourself. He’s still seems lost, perhaps even looking like all the air got knocked out of his lungs, but he looks at you resolute, glasz eyes so determined when you order him once again, and the call concludes right after his curt nod. With a few keystrokes, the apartment address is sent his way.

Looking back over, you watch the maniac’s face for a few short moments, observing for any abnormalities in his demeanor, yet all you find is what you had examined for earlier: his void expression, his shaking breaths, his slack jaw. You brush away the strawberry tresses sitting on his forehead, pressing the back of your hand to test his temperature. He’s warm—warmer than he should be—and you don’t know if his body can regulate an oncoming fever.

Calling out to him with a rough “hey,” you wrap an arm around your shoulders and hold it there, taking him by the waist with your spare hand. As you pull him up, he makes a noise in his throat—a strained sigh, perhaps a groan—that isn’t just his uneven, staggered breathing. He’s responsive, barely, and he struggles to keep his body up, knees buckling, having already lost their strength before you made it here.

You scan your surroundings after taking your first step, acting as his crutch as you guide him to the motorcycle a few feet away. It’s horribly desolate, and you assume that the one you’re holding up took the brunt of the damage and anyone else involved has since left to tend to their own wounds.

He’s stumbling, tripping over his own feet, his body gradually drooping away from you with each scattered step. You tighten your grip around his waist, pulling him closer as you make your way to the vehicle. At this point, you’re essentially carrying him, his body heavier than you remember as he slowly ceases to walk properly. The toes of his shoes scrape against the asphalt as you drag him along, his arm tight around the back of your neck. His grip is painful for you, but you know nothing is for him.

Tori leaves his place on the fire escape railing and sits on the handlebars of the bike, inquiring on his mental and physical state, where all you tell him is “not good.” The bird falls quiet, observing as you get closer.

When you reach to the motorcycle you crane your neck to peer at his face; he looks weakened, his eyelids threatening to shut as he stands almost like he’s become frail. You speak to him again, your voice low yet loud enough for him to hear, and he nods weakly after you tell him that he needs to get on the bike, but his consciousness is slipping so quickly, so rapidly that he can’t do much more than the minimal sign of affirmation.

Pulling and unhooking his left arm from your neck, checking the gauze on his hand for any crimson soaked into the material—there is none—you curl your arm fully around his waist and shift your other hand to support him from beneath his right arm. You carefully swivel his body around until his back is directed at the edge of the seat before settling him onto it. He’s nearly unconscious at this point, and with his head resting on your clavicle, you lift from the underside of his knee to hang the leg over the other side of the bike, relying on the last of his strength before his muscles relax entirely.

Keeping his torso upright is difficult as you move to mount the vehicle yourself, but you manage, somehow, and after you’ve joined him he leans forward to use your back as an involuntary rest. With his chest flushed against your back you can feel his body heat permeate through the multiple layers of clothing that separate his skin from yours. His temperature will likely only rise further, and you hope that the humid air will suffice for the sweat that his body doesn’t know how to create.

Tori leaps from the handlebars as you turn the key in the ignition. You, however, don’t watch him as he flies above the buildings and back towards the residential district, more focused on securing the kid, ensuring his safety. You grab his forearm from behind you and wrap it around your waist, holding it firmly against your stomach as you pull out of the street, retracing your path.

As you ride with him in tow, likely breaking any traffic laws while you maneuver past crowded vehicles blocking your way, you try to gauge his stability, but you cannot feel his breath ghosting over your spine like yesterday, and all you can feel from him is the lax weight on your back, the growing warmth of his hand, the studs of his cuffs poking into your abdomen.

The beating in your chest has slowed down, has settled, but that clench in your gut hasn’t left, and neither has that pressure in the base of your throat. You hadn’t foreseen yourself becoming so worried over this kid, this brat who lives with an “actions first, ask questions later” mindset, with little to no regard for the feelings of others and an outlook on life that requires him to rely on himself and no one else.

He’s a lot like you, in many ways.

And you didn’t think he’d make you worry, yet here you are, clutching onto his hand and bringing him back home in a flurry, streetlamps and neon signs blurring at the edges of your vision.

* * *

 

It doesn’t take long to return to the apartment, and by the time you pull into the parking lot the sun has set past the mountains, leaving the dimming afterglow of orange fading into a dark, greying indigo. At your back, the maniac is completely feeble; without your hold on his arm around your waist you’re certain that he would have fallen off a few kilometers ago.

You’re standing up with his hand still in yours—fingers limp, unmoving, body slumping sideways—when you feel the first few droplets of rain. Your prediction was proven wrong, unfortunately. With a curse under your breath, you resolve swiftly with carrying him to the complex building, gripping him by the hips and hoisting him onto your shoulder. He’s a dead weight on your frame, yet in your haste you hardly take note of it as you climb the stairway.

Every step you take is resounding, your boots shaking the frame of the metal stairs more than usual. You’ve disturbed the neighbors, confused voices trailing after you as you run with the heaviness of two people, but you pay them little mind, too absorbed in getting him inside. The kid’s feet jostle as you reach for the top floor, jutting into your stomach as you get higher, higher up the well-kept building, and by the time you get to the door your heart has starting throbbing like before. You aren’t certain if it is the worry eating at your core or the physical exertion you’ve forced upon yourself.

Swinging the door open, the doorstop on the adjacent wall catches the handle and rebounds slightly back to you as you walk inside. As you’re striding to the sofa—likely tracking dirt inside with your boots—and beginning to lift him from his place on your shoulder, your Allmate joins you, keeping himself afloat just on the threshold of your peripheral vision. Without missing a beat you tell him to watch outside, and he leaves, waving a small breeze of air in his path.

With your arm around the back of his thighs and your other hand braced on his mid-back, you carefully position him onto the cushions, and you’re mindful of settling his head onto the armrest gently, despite his inability to really feel it at all, especially in his deteriorating mental state.

You check his vitals, briefly—pressing two fingers on his neck; pressing two on his wrists; listening, counting his breathing—before working at the buttons of his shirt, pulling it off to minimize the amount of heat his body is absorbing. You do the same with his pants, unclasping the sleeping cubes from the belt loops, unbuckling the coordinated belt, then shuffling off the shin-length trousers. Removing the hat that clung to his skull the entire way here, you then stack the two cuffs inside of it. The small bundle of attire is discarded onto the coffee table.

He isn’t sweating—his body can’t use it, doesn’t have the means to—however, returning your palm to his forehead, you find that his fever is getting worse, and in a blur you head straight to the kitchen. Searching through each cabinet, you manage to come across a stack of dishcloths stored within the island, and grabbing the first one you see—standard white, clean, pristine, unused—you run it under a cold stream from the tap until it’s completely soaked through. Wringing it, twisting the ends in opposing directions in a manner so similar to what you’ve done everyday for years, the water drops into the sink basin in rhythm with the cascading rain just outside the sliding glass door.

Walking back to tend to him, his eyes flutter open just so, and even in the poor illumination of the room you can see the slivers of green past his lashes, dilated pupils staring right at you as you kneel beside him. You sweep away the pale fringe from his brow and rest the cooled cloth on his forehead. He says nothing—doesn’t have the energy to—while he watches you, breath shuddered, lips parted, brows knitted with an expression you struggle to decipher.

His hand at his side, the one you are closest to, twitches as if he’s trying to raise it towards you. Without hesitation you snake your fingers into his palm, sweeping around the side of his wrapped hand before grasping it fully; when you squeeze, he only barely reciprocates the gesture.

His eyes fall closed again, and you sit there watching his breathing with his hand in yours, his fingers going lax as he slips back into an unconscious state.

Reaching out to you—both literally and figuratively—is strange, but you understand it with perfect clarity, seeing yourself reflected in its meaning. Both of you are lonely; two independent individuals who rely on no one but themselves to get what they want or need, disregarding unnecessary emotional baggage to make everything easier. For you, it was to prevent any hindrance in your journey for revenge, yet for him it’s a sort of defense mechanism, something he must have developed from a childhood without an understanding of empathy.

You don’t know the details, but you know that he—much like you in the past—has emotional wounds that have yet to completely heal.

* * *

 

Time passes slowly, almost achingly so, before Tori comes back inside. He seemingly ignores the sight of you holding the maniac’s hand—makes no mention of it—in favor of alerting you of Aoba’s arrival as he perches on the opposite armrest. Slightly turning your head to the right, you watch the entryway and anticipate the distant sound of footsteps. It doesn’t take long—just a few stretched moments—before the faint rattling of the stairs drifts into the suite, the rushed climbing of someone that you can hear from the bottom of the stairwell.

The rain outside grows heftier as you wait, the kid in front of you still just barely clinging onto your hand while he falls in and out of alertness, and when the steps get closer you let go and stand. Within seconds, Aoba rushes past the opened doorway, dripping wet umbrella in hand, panting in an attempt to catch his breath, face lined in a mixture of precipitation and sweat, and entirely alone. You have an idea of the meaning behind the dog’s absence.

Staring at him as he tentatively walks further inside you think that he’s as beautiful as you last time you laid eyes upon him, the image of his soft skin and glistening hair the same as it all was in your memory. He looks back at you with a conflicting combination of uncertainty, worry, relief, and he stops just short, closed umbrella hanging stiffly at his side.

You don’t let him speak before you step aside, knitting your brows and keeping your expression hardened when all you tell him is “do it.” He doesn’t move initially, just taking in a deep breath and pursing his lips, but soon he sets the umbrella on the wooden floor to rest against the wall and takes a few strides forward. He hesitantly shifts his eyes from you to the maniac, studying him before he replaces you, getting down onto his kneels and cupping his face in his hands.

From where you stand you can’t deduce if his eyes are open or not, but Aoba speaks to him in the voice that, if events of three weeks ago had played out differently, would have been something you abused, a tool you forced him to use for your own goals. There’s a spark of energy in the air, and right as it dissipates Aoba becomes slack, muscles in his legs relaxing as his head sinks onto the edge of the cushion, his fingers lingering on the maniac’s jaw.

You turn away after a while, leaving for the entryway as you close your eyes, pushing away any anxieties before they even begin to appear. The rain roars as it falls, thunder echoing across the district while you close the front door. You shrug off your coat, and while you’re hooking it onto the rack mounted on the wall Tori comes up and lands onto your shoulder. Meeting his gaze, you expect to find an accusatory glance, a shine in his eye that almost mocks you, yet you’re only met with a look that says that he understands.

To pass the time, you stepped out onto the veranda to grab the bedsheets, luckily dry as the rain hadn’t swerved toward this side of the building but rather away from it, and folded them after going inside, leaving the stack on the shelves in the understocked utility closet. A smoke sounds wonderful—a way to ward off your nerves—so you head into the entryway and you pull the pipe from the breast pocket of your coat, taking out the rabbit cube and the lighter with it. Observing the small block, you notice that it has gone dim, resting in sleep mode as it sits in your palm, and you place it atop the shelf to wait for its owner to awake.

You return to the veranda, bringing the pipe to your lips and lighting the tobacco left over from several days ago. The flame exudes a tiny heat to your thumb, and it disappears swiftly after you let go of the flint switch. As the smoke flows into your lungs, you’re reminded of how long it’s been since you even touched the thin pipe; it’s been at least three or four days, and when you’ve been smoking nearly everyday since adolescence it’s difficult to go without it.

Absentmindedly, your thoughts wavering between yourself and the two individuals inside the apartment, you wonder what happens next. You don’t doubt Aoba’s abilities—you’ve experienced them firsthand, just like the other three—and you know that he is powerful beyond compare, but it’s possible that something may go wrong, that they may never open their eyes again, that one or both of them may have their mind so shattered that they’re no longer the same people.

The results are completely foreign to you, your uncertainty gnawing at your insides.

Beside your ear the bird preens at his wings, fluffing the feathers like routine from every day before; all you hear is the rain before you, coating the neighborhood and the distant mountains in a cleansing blanket, and the clicking of a bird’s beak. All of it—the ambient sounds at your eardrums, the familiar intake of smoke, the gloom of the weather—is very soothing, and only when you begin to soak it in does the wind divert and bring the rain to fall against you.

In aggravation, you let a few droplets extinguish the burning tobacco as Tori leaps from your shoulder, equally annoyed at the weather shift. You slide the door open and the bird enters before you, gliding straight for the kitchen, landing firmly onto the tall sink faucet to shake off the bit of water from his feathers. You sigh, placing the pipe onto the glass-top table, stepping backward to lean against a spot on the wall beside the sofa.

You observe the rain hitting the glass door, hitting and dripping and skirting onto the surface endlessly, a repeated and scattered melody reverberating into the expansive room. For a while, you stay like that, your arms crossed over your chest while you peer at the doorway, getting lost in the view. However, from the corner of your eye there’s a flicker of movement, and when you turn your head you watch as Aoba raises his head, eyes drowsy and half-lidded like he had been sleeping for hours.

You push yourself off from the wall, circling to stand in front of the couch. Aoba pulls his hands away from the youngest—still unawakened—and places them into his lap, blinking himself back into the tangible world before standing up. The two of you look down at the couch, watching for his eyelashes to twitch, for his brows to knit, for his chest to expand with a morning breath, but he remains the same; if anything, his breathing has evened, and you take slight comfort from it.

Yet, in the dim light, you see a glimmer of something on his temple and you bend down to get a closer look at the odd shine. From your back Aoba peeks at you, trying to figure out what you’re doing, when you notice that it’s a droplet of water, of some kind of liquid. Earlier you had wrung the dishcloth until it was only slightly damp—enough so that it wouldn’t drip any tap water—and there’s no possible way that the rain had landed anywhere past the veranda door.

When you reach a finger to swipe at the droplet, the kid begins to wake, his eyelids lifted languidly as he shifts his gaze to you. You touch the edge of his cheekbone to wipe away the bead on his skin, but his eyes grow wide and he inhales sharply, audibly. Before you can pull away he swats at your hand, sitting up in a flurry, and you hear Aoba gasp at your shoulder as he steps back from the couch, the washcloth landing at his feet.

Meeting his gaze, the brat stares at you with his lips pursed into a straight line, and even though he’s only expressing it through his eyes and his brows, you can read the terror on his face. He holds his breath, swallows hard as you look back at him—you’re trying to untangle your thoughts somehow, someway—when his nose wrinkles as if he only just realized something, and he looks down at the hand he hit you with.

He exhales, brows furrowing darkly, and he lifts his head once more, trading between looking at you and looking at Aoba. He’s panicking, his fingers shaking as he struggles to breathe, to take in air, to steady himself in his own horror.

The other man calls out to him, calls him by name, and the quiet voice seems to break him from his spell; he immediately rises from his seat, running past Aoba to the bedroom. You rise back to your feet from your kneeling position, following him with your eyes, and Aoba shouts after him. Without looking over his shoulder, without any sign of acknowledgment, he swings the door open, then slams it shut with such ferocity that the person standing beside you flinches.

A few elongated seconds of silence passes when Aoba, bewilderment and concern coating his voice, asks you what happened, turning his head to look at you for an answer. You don’t shift to look at him and instead all you respond with is that you don’t know, but already the pieces are falling into place and you have ideas.

* * *

 

Placing his mug onto the stark granite counter, you sit down on the bar stool across from Aoba at the kitchen island. He takes the offered coffee with a small thank you, wrapping slender digits almost delicately around the ceramic cup, and lifts it to his mouth; he blows at the steaming beverage in a way you’ve only seen children do. When he takes his first sip, a small smile pulls at his lips, and you take that as your cue to drink as well.

You think that the coffee calms his nerves, and once he has started the conversation he ends up doing most of the talking. The first thing he says to you is how surprised he is to see you, having previously thought that you vanished entirely and been unable see you ever again after the incident at the tower. He continues—about how “Noiz never mentioned you,” how he hadn’t heard anything about Scratch, how you were the only one to go silent, how he hadn’t run into you at all in the city—and he asks you how you have been.

You answer quietly—you’re fine—and in the moment you feel so natural, so normal speaking with this person before you, who seems so comfortable sitting down with you over something so casual as a drink, as if the awful things you had done to him in the past had never happened to begin with. He makes a remark about how you seem different, leaning forward in a manner that says he knows at least one reason—your shackles nowhere to be found—and that he’s curious what exactly has changed in you.

Taking a sip from the mug held heavily in your hand, you don’t respond as you flick your eyes up at him. He sighs through his nose, deciding to not press further, yet he appears content with your refusal to answer as he leans back into his seat and drinks his sweetened coffee. Taking the opportunity during the lull in the conversation, you inquire what he saw in Scrap.

There’s a shift in his expression and suddenly his body language is more reserved, less interpersonal as he shuffles in his seat, ducking his head as he looks away. He sets the mug down and searches for his words, and you wait patiently while he scans the countertop with his eyes as if what he wants to say is written in the speckled stone.

He tells you that there are things he shouldn’t say out loud, that he is in no place to speak in place of the person whose mind he entered so easily, but that the maniac is in a lot of pain, so much pain, and that Aoba had no idea how much he was hurting. Aoba tucks his hands in his lap while you listen to him carefully, revealing he was unaware of the kid’s inability to feel pain before he pauses, raises his head, and then asks you another question.

He asks you if you’re usually with him—with the maniac—and you nod in affirmation.

Sticking around with the kid isn’t something you planned on, never something you foresaw yourself doing back when you first met him in that junk shop. Yet here you are, sitting in his apartment for the second day in a row after carrying him back home, after sharing a quick fuck in the bedroom, after rushing him to the hospital, after his rejecting you, after your refusal. It’s been over half a month and he is one of the few and only constants in your life now.

You are able to decipher much of the person he carries himself as, drawing conclusions from his condition and his behavioral patterns, from how he reacts to certain provocations and from how he responds to your own actions. Both of you are lonely, and just like you he presents himself in an aloof manner to fool people—people like Aoba—in order to avoid an image of vulnerability.

Part of you is resentful of how much you’ve been around him as seeing him completely debilitated has made you realize that—without any sort of foresight—you were getting attached, your loss of your composure when he sent a distress call, the immediacy of every move you made to ensure his recovery, being the clearest signs of—to put it simply—his importance to you.

Both of you are lonely, and it is perhaps because of that fact that he looked at you with such a foreign expression in his eyes when he reached out for your hand, that he tightened his grip on yours before slipping again, that for one of the first times he didn’t recoil at your initiative.

Aoba’s next question is unexpected, the request throwing you off when he asks you if you’ll watch out for him. When he waits for your response, he tilts his head just slightly, the upturn of his brows relaxing as curls his fingers around the mug once more. You try, however, to keep your mild puzzlement from showing on your face until you look away and only reply about his inability to take care of himself in the first place, bringing the mug to your bottom lip once more.

When you glance up again, the smile of the person sitting in front of you perplexes you, an upturn of his mouth that tells you that he knows something you don’t—it isn’t malicious, not in the least, but rather an endearing, warm grin that reminds you of your mother in a strangely nostalgic way. He leans forward, resting his elbows onto the counter and drinks the last of his coffee, cradling the onyx cup with both hands. The bottom of the mug sets onto the polished countertop with a muted clink when he puts it down for the final time.

Before he hops off of the tall stool, he opens his Coil and says he wants to trade his contact information for yours, imploring for you to update you on the maniac’s condition “as soon as you can,” as well as for you to keep in touch; he’s glad that you’re still around, apparently. You give in, unable to dismiss the genuine look of gentle happiness on his face when he asks, sending your number to him through your own Coil. The pieces of tech ring with a concluding chime once the respective data has been transferred, and Aoba appears gratified at your cooperation.

Grabbing his jacket from the back of the stool after leaving his seat, he threads his arms through the sleeves and shrugs it onto his shoulders. You take the brief moment of his distraction and absorb one last look at him, wondering what could have happened differently, wondering if there was any possible future where you could hold him like he was something precious, wondering if the maniac, if Red, if the gas mask yearn for the same thing as you do.

With a modest wave he bids you goodbye, turning around to leave into the entryway. Without leaving your seat, you listen to him leave, listen to the sound of the front door opening when it doesn’t echo closed a second later. He calls out to you with a hesitant voice from the end of the hall, and you get up to see what he wants, bracing a hand on the thin side of the wall.

Standing in the doorway with umbrella in hand, he looks at you a bit nervous, but he thanks you.

He clarifies, thanking you for aiding him in his search for his grandmother, thanking you for helping him when he was cornered in the tower, and once he gets the words out his expression is earnest. All you can respond with is a short “yeah,” and he gives you one last smile—like the one he gave you before, the one about taking care of the maniac—before stepping outside and closing the door behind him.

At your back, Tori muses at the young man’s warmth, and you affirm his statement by saying that Aoba is “too warm.” Dropping your hand from its place on the wall, you step back into the kitchen and contemplate the clenching in the center of your chest.


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We were both in the same place  
> We were kindred, kindred minds  
> Yet now I see that maybe we need to change this time
> 
> [ _Kindred._ ](http://splitbricks.tumblr.com/post/97448261537)

It takes four days until he leaves his bedroom.

You know that the kid is simply avoiding contact from everyone; you haven’t seen him once since he bolted from the sofa that night, and you have received a few messages from Aoba inquiring about his wellness as every attempt he has made in communicating with the shut-in had been ultimately ignored. When you awoke the morning after, the rabbit cubes and the pieces of his attire scattered on the coffee table had vanished, and later that day you could hear him speak in a low whisper with his Allmate, the two voices too muted past the wall for you to distinguish their words.

You know that he isn’t isolating himself into his room completely; when you come back into the apartment—be it from smoking out on the veranda or from a visit to the other districts—you’ll notice small things around the suite have changed. Sometimes a remote or coaster will be misplaced on the coffee table and you notice that the seat cushion is still warm. Sometimes you’ll open the fridge to make a meal and the shelves will be slightly emptier than the last time you looked inside. Sometimes you’ll walk into the washroom and feel the moisture of the tiled floor under your feet, the mirror still fogged into a murky reflection as the showerhead leaks lukewarm water into the drainpipe.

And you know that he’s coming around at his own pace; you tried to coax him out the day after the incident, but after you received no response you decided that he should take whatever time he needed. If he wanted you gone, he would have kicked you out by now, you remind yourself.

The past few days have passed quietly, where you spend most of your hours maintaining the apartment, leaving for shopping trips to purchase groceries, toiletries, soaps. When gathering the clothing and accessories that you removed, the maniac must have missed the single cube that signaled his distress call as it was left in sleep mode on top of the coat rack shelf, resting in dim unawareness. You use the cube as your reference point—a reminder of what its owner buys for himself—and it inexplicably became friendly with your own Allmate when you started carrying it around.

While you’re cooking—you always make enough for two—the two bots chat on the counter or in some corner of the suite while you work. Initially, Tori was quite smug—haughty, just as he was programed to be—but you think it’s because of the factual, face-value nature of the rabbit-faced block that he eventually gave up the arrogant attitude, and now they get along surprisingly well. You usually shut out their conversations, but recalling the few you’ve eavesdropped on you’ve heard them mock that red sparrow Allmate several times.

You think that, after the second day, the kid decided not to reclaim the spare cube in order to spy on you, to keep track of you, while you wait for him to stand in the same room as you again. A few weeks ago, this would have bothered you, annoyed you, perhaps even angered you, yet now you don’t mind.

It takes four days until he leaves his bedroom, and at the nearing conclusion of the fourth night you’re rinsing out a bowl in the sink, having wrapped and placed the second half of the food you prepared in the refrigerator. The bird and the block sit next to you on the island, stiffened and dimmed in sleep mode. You’ve left on the table lamp in the corner of the counters behind you, and the only other illumination is the moonlight streaming through the blinds of the veranda door.

The steady streaming of the water, the shrunken squeak of the sponge, the droplets draining down the disposal—it’s all soothing, familiar. It’s all a chore you’ve done over and over, as if you’re a resident of this apartment that isn’t yours, as if you’ve always done this.

You honestly didn’t expect it—didn’t expect the slow creak of the bedroom door as it pulls open in the edge of your vision, didn’t expect the gradual appearance of pale flesh emerging from the shadows behind the wooden door. You honestly didn’t expect it now, a few minutes past seven in the evening on a Thursday, but you don’t know what time, what day you should have anticipated it.

He leaves the door open once he passes the frame, and you can hardly see his face from where you stand, raising your head while you pause your cleaning, keeping your hold on the smooth ceramic dish and the dirtied sponge as he gets closer to you.

Stepping into the faint light shining from behind you, he is wearing nothing but a pair of loose sweatpants, dark grey cotton gripping languidly at his hips, and white bandages looped around the palm of his left hand, and for all the times you’ve had sex with him this is the most naked he has ever appeared to you. He circles around the island and you follow him with your eyes. When he takes his last step towards you, you set the dish and the sponge into the sink basin, the sound of ceramic meeting metal ringing in your ears as you turn to face him properly.

The warm light softly bounces off the contours of his face, highlighting the ridges beneath his brows, below his lips, along the sharp line of his nose. The rightmost side of his face is delicately illuminated while the leftmost is sunken in darkness, and the gaze he bores into your skull would be the bored, uninterested one he’s always worn if it weren’t for the faint twinge in his eyebrows, the involuntary part in his lips, the slight downturn of his chin. He’s different.

No words pass between the two of you in the deafening silence. Without hesitation he leans upward—lifting the heels of his feet from the floor just enough—and he joins your lips with his own, tilting his head as he lets his eyelids fall.

The kiss is gentle—almost chaste—and so different from the others you’ve shared prior; there’s no heat in it, no rush, no intense emotions boiling at the back of it. It’s painfully genuine, one of the first authentic moments he’s given to you, and with a twinge of something between your ribs you return the kiss with no more vigor than he does. With your eyes still open your vision is nothing but the golden tone of his skin, darkened eyelashes casting soft shadows onto the slopes of his cheekbones.

It ends only an elongated moment later.

He pulls away, settling back onto his feet, and when he opens his eyes his gaze meets yours easily like it always has. There’s a second of clarity—his toes so close to touching yours, the faint touch of his fingers on your abdomen, upturned eyes looking back at you in a sharp tone of green, the warm light engulfing the two of you—and you realize that this is a repetition, a second attempt at your first instance of intimacy that lacked the emotional attachment.

This time, he doesn’t stare at you with that insufferable smirk, his lips formed into a subtle frown until he speaks, voice uncharacteristically low, subdued, solemn, and he demands that you come to bed with him without the commanding inflection to enforce it. He corrects himself, asking you if you’ll follow him into the bedroom, and it’s in the way he curls his fingers around your wrist—you’re lying beside him in his bed, you leave, and he lets go—that you grow soft, your shoulders drooping as if you’re finally giving in.

He’s different, and you understand why.

You study the maniac—no, it’s Noiz; his name is Noiz—and while he still wears such a stoic expression, one that you undoubtedly have on yourself, he seems so much more fragile, more vulnerable to you, like the way he looks when he’s sleeping. His wiry digits scarcely tighten on your wrist, the pad of his thumb pressed against the pulse wedged in the tender flesh between thin tendons and small bones; his eyes search your face, scanning back and forth as he waits for some kind of response.

Quietly, you tell him a simple, serene “yes,” the tone reverberating from the base of your neck as you duck your head just so, roped dreads following the movement to curtain your face as you lean in closer. With a slight quirk at the corner of his mouth, he shifts forward as if to meet you halfway before turning his head away. He shifts his hand downward to properly grasp your hand, digging his fingers into your palm, to pull and lead you like so many times before, and you follow him with no resistance, letting him guide you through to the obscured doorway.

Past the frame he stops and faces you once more, removing his hold on your hand to grasp the meeting between your shoulder and your neck and then kisses you, caressing his other hand from your abdomen to the small of your back, craning his head while you reciprocate with the same passion. It’s slow, more calculated and more deliberate than what the two of you have done in the past. You don’t touch him, only going as far into the kiss as he is—tracing his bottom lip with your tongue, pulling at the silver piercing with your teeth—and perhaps it is a subconscious obligation of yours to avoid overstepping the boundaries of someone who aggressively rebuffed your initiative every time.

As it gradually grows more heated, Noiz pushes against you with impatience, grumbling in his throat as if he’s trying to steer you in some kind of new direction. He begins pecking at your lips repeatedly when you don’t move further, and in his frustration practically pleads with you to touch him within the gaps of each kiss. You abide, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and cupping the nape of his neck with your hand—rounded metal fitted between the undersides of your knuckles—as you thread your fingers into his hair.

He hums approvingly, capturing your mouth fully again, then exhaling through his nose, and the gentle air skirts across your cheekbone while you shift your unoccupied hand to grip onto his hip, rubbing circles onto the bone. You ensure that you’re being tender with him, understanding his motivations for choosing you, choosing to do this with you, understanding what touch means to him now.

You knew after reversing and replaying that evening—the droplet of sweat on his temple, the temperate heat of his skin, the silently terrified widening of his eyes, the violent swat at your touch—in your head that, whatever Aoba had done to him regardless of his intent, had changed Noiz in an unimaginable way. You knew that he had gained the sensation of pain, the sensation of temperature, the sensation of subtle touch as a consequence of putting his mind back together. You knew that he needed time to adjust.

And you knew what it would mean if he came to you like he had tonight.

Slowing down, he shifts the hand at your shoulder to pull at the band tightened around your head, tugging it off and guiding through your hair before letting it drop onto the floor, and for the first time you let him strip you without any objection.

He then moves to remove the tie holding your hair back, yet struggles with the knot—using only his uninjured hand—so you assist him and untangle it with ease. The locks fall forward and suddenly your head feels a little heavier. He draws himself back from the kiss to look up at you properly, and you notice a shade of pink that you’ve never seen on his cheeks before, the lights of the surrounding neighborhood peering through the uncovered window being enough to brighten his face for you to see him unobstructed.

Sliding both hands underneath your t-shirt, he tells you to take this off, too, so you stretch your arm behind you and tug at the neckline of the shirt as he pushes it up with the backs of his fingers. You toss it aside, trailing your hand from his nape to his upper arms, gently curling your fingers around the sinewy limb while you bring your left hand to his other arm to mirror the gesture.

The two of you watch each other, him absorbing view he has of you that is so foreign, so new—the smallest changes undoubtedly making you appear so different—and you survey the flush in his face, the rise and fall of his chest while he evens his breath.

He breaks eye contact before leaning forward, dropping his head to rest on your shoulder, and his shaking breath dances on your neck as gaunt hands sprawl across your torso, the gauze on his palm itching at your waist. For a long time, he stays like this, completely unmoving as he basks in the warmth of your skin, and you patiently wait while stroking one of his arms down to his elbow. Almost inaudibly, almost to himself, he remarks at the heat, gliding a hand up over your chest, and you feel the soft brush of his eyelashes fluttering, the cold steel of his brow piercings on your shoulder muscle.

Soon he presses his lips to the side of your neck, opening his mouth and trailing the tip of his tongue over the sensitive skin. You involuntarily roll your head back and sigh, opening up to him in a manner that you never would have dared to do before, and he takes the opportunity eagerly, lifting his head just slightly to gnaw at the exposed muscles as he slides his hands to grip onto your shoulders.

He continues his ministrations, flattening the pierced muscle as he licks from the tip of your collarbone to your jaw, before shifting to the front of your throat and gingerly biting at the apple of it, earning him a moan that rumbles from the hollow of your throat. After a while you get lost in this, your eyelids threatening to fall closed as you stare out above the strawberry blond tresses that hover at the bottom of your vision, your hips flush against his, tightening your hold on his arms as he persists at your throat.

You dig your thumb into his arm—not enough to hurt—and he stops for just a moment, parting from you and exhaling a breath that ghosts over the damp blotches scattered around your neck, sending a faint shiver down your spine. Slithering a hand from your shoulder to the base of your skull, his lips graze your skin as he says, “I want you to fuck me. I don’t care how you do it.”

When he lunges back to resume his handiwork, you lightly push at his arms, shift a foot forward and duck your head, coaxing him backward so you can take his mouth again; he responds readily, beginning to navigate in the direction behind him while pulling you with him.

Releasing your hold on his arms, Noiz breaks the kiss a split second after, collapsing onto the bed once his calves have met the side of the frame. He lifts his body with his arms and shifts backward until he’s settled in the middle of the spacious mattress, recently cleaned sheets wrinkling as you follow suit, crawling after him. You hover over his slender form as he settles his back fully onto the bed, and despite the enshrouding darkness of the room you think you see a smirk pull at the corner of his mouth while he looks back up at you, feather-like touch of his fingertips skimming your ribcage.

Before making your next move, you reach an arm over to your left and switch the table lamp on with a mute yank of the pull-chain; it floods the room with a cool off-white radiance, providing you an unimpeded view of the person who has managed to unwittingly take over your life for nearly three weeks, the person who gazes at you with a smile that doesn’t serve to mock you but rather challenge you.

On the outside he’s virtually the same—glistening metal assembled all over his body; haphazardly maintained pale hair; chartreuse irises held in sharp, narrowed eyes—but you know that underneath the exterior, within his heart, that something is changing, that something has already changed. You know not just by being present for the events that transpired to these consequences, but also by the way he looks at you now, animosity nowhere to be found in his brows, hostility nowhere in his jawline.

With a slight twitch of your lips you throw him the same expression, then bowing your head to trail his chin, his throat, his collarbones with your mouth. He lets out a pleasant sigh, and you can hear the laugh in his voice when he taunts you for switching on the lamp—regarding your supposed desire to see him in blatant light—in an attempt to get under your skin. Raising your eyebrows as you watch him, not servicing him with a reply, you move downward to swipe your tongue over a nipple, and instantaneously you’re gratified by his response, the complacent grin dropping as he takes in a sharp inhale, not expecting the sensation at all.

You lift your head and, in spite of your enjoyment over his reddened complexion, you look at him earnestly as you stroke his side, telling him to stay quiet. With an amused huff, he rests his head fully onto the pillow, dragging a hand through his hair while complying with your request.

Stopping your hand at the hem of his sweatpants, you peck at his torso as you progress your way downward, kissing along the final left rib branching from his sternum, scattering the presses of your lips along his abdomen, dipping your tongue to flick at the curved barbell peeking from his navel. A breathy moan escapes his lips as you palm him through his sweatpants, scraping your teeth carefully on the hip bone jutting from underneath his flesh while kneeling between his legs.

While you shift over to graze your teeth on the other protruding hip, you sneak your fingers into his sweatpants and hook around the elastic waistband, pulling them down until his cock is wholly exposed, swollen, stained rose and scarlet. The panting resonating above you becomes shakier, the sound hitching in his throat when you take him into your hand and begin attentively caressing him, dragging your tongue along the skin below his navel.

You take your time, pumping him at an arduous pace, building him up stroke by stroke until his thigh muscles uncontrollably shudder at your sides, and you take that as your signal to lick the underside of his length, starting at the base and dragging your tongue to the head. He gasps, the breath getting caught as he reaches for the pillow beside him, and you glance up at him—staring right at you, unwavering, face florid under his lashes—as you bow your head to envelop the glans with your lips.

He shuts his eyes, choking on air and clinging onto the pillow case, and his knees quiver as you accept him further, loosely looping fingers around the base as his dick delves deeper into your mouth, the barbell piercing nudging the back of your throat. The taste is bitter, your lips becoming coated with the pre-come that had encompassed his length with the work of your hand, and as you pause at the base before raising your head again you combat the involuntary need to gag.

Noiz attempts to steady himself—latching onto the bedsheets, burying his face into the pillow—and quietly cries out from your ministrations, panting in a hushed voice while you pull back and repeat the motion continuously, grasping an unoccupied hand onto his waist as you carry on.

He is unraveling entirely, falling apart at the seams in every way, and you can’t refrain yourself from enjoying every second of it.

Taking him only half-way inside, you twist your hand holding the base within the same rhythm, and you maintain your gaze at his face, absorbing his image—the color spreading over his cheekbones, the sweat beading at his temple, the hair sticking to his brow, the protrusion of his collarbones—as he contorts under you. Before now, you hadn’t ever performed on him; the piercings gliding against your tongue and past your lips is difficult growing accustomed to, a sensation you couldn’t have truly predicted before tasting it yourself.

Not so much that you mind, though, if it means you can reduce him to this trembling mess, and from the way he’s gasping for air, you know he won’t be able to stand much more of it.

With him reaching his limit at such a rapid rate, you take him deeper again, switching your hand on his cock to the other side of his waist until your nose is pushing into the patch of blond hair resting beneath the contoured muscles formed at his abdomen. He moves his grip from the sheets to your hair, tangling the digits through the ropes and clutching onto them while arching his back, chest heaving as his breathing increasingly turns uneven.

As he widens his legs to accommodate you better, the kid pushes down at the hold he has on your hair, and you think that it’s because he’s gotten so lost in all of this that he ruts into your mouth, tossing his head back as he comes with a shivering, strangled gasp. He clings onto you with his mouth spread wide open, digging his heels into the mattress as his body convulses briefly, muscles quivering then halting to a stop when he finishes.

You swallow every drop he pumps out, enduring your own agony at the back of your throat as you ease him out of his orgasm. Once the fingers gripping at your scalp go slack, once his breathing begins to normalize, you pull away and he stretches his legs forward, sprawling his exhausted body flat onto the mattress. You lift your head and let his softening cock escape from your mouth as it falls against his lower abdomen.

Unmoving, you catch your breath, holding yourself up with your forearms while still cupping his waist, his figure expanding and shrinking as you drift your palms down to his hips.

Almost immediately he lightly yanks upward at your hair, urging you to come closer, and in spite of your lungs' demand for air you abide to his nudging. Releasing your grip from his hips and supporting your body with your elbows braced on the bed, you let him pull you closer, cradling the back of your skull with his hands and raising his shoulders off of the mattress to meet you properly.

With little indecision, he kisses you again, slipping his tongue past your lips; given your previous experiences with him—particularly from the first time the two of you fucked in that decrepit, decaying building—you're unsurprised at his lack of repulsion to tasting himself on your tongue. You push back, kissing with more precision than the languid energy he gives to you, his snakebites jabbing occasionally at your chin as you share a slow embrace.

Soon he parts from you, and threading his fingers out of your dreadlocks to rest on your shoulders he expresses some disappointment not in your performance—which was wonderful, assuming from the slight aftershocks twitching at his thigh muscles—but rather in your decision to persist until he finished. You let out a light snort, watching the slight furrow of his brows and the downturn at the corners of his mouth as he speaks, before he pushes you to lie beside him on his left and rolls over to face you.

After your head lands onto the feather pillow, he says something about it being “your turn,” that casual yet perhaps slightly playful irritation still lining his voice as he unbuttons your jeans with his good hand. You open your mouth to object, to slow him down for a second, but your words are lost when he trails his fingers across your dick after shoving his hand past the hem and are instead replaced with a groan from deep in your throat.

There’s little reasoning you can come up with to have him hold off if even for just a moment before he thrusts his tongue back into your mouth, so you give in and let him have his way with you. You’d be lying if you claimed you didn’t enjoy it, his bony digits tugging you from underneath your jeans while the piercing in his tongue clinks against your teeth ever so often.

The point of sucking him off until he finished—if there is even any point at all—was that this isn’t about you, that this is about him and his newfound ability to feel touch without a barrier that is as hindering as thick rubber over his skin.

Yet, with him caressing you with both his hand and his tongue, you figure that it doesn’t matter who exactly you think this about.

He nibbles at your bottom lip while he works below your waist, and you can feel the light grin pulling at his lips as he kisses you—the thumb of his bandaged hand rubbing elliptic rings over one of your nipples—yet you aren’t quite decided on what sensation you should concentrate on. You loop your arm beneath his to curl your hand around the nape of his neck, brushing over the barbells like before, and rest your other hand flat under the pillow resting below the side of your head.

It’s like he’s suffocating you; he’s taking all of your breath for himself as he molds his lips with yours, your body dismantling as he squeezes your flesh within his grip and pumps you at a quickening pace. Despite the vulgarity of it all—handjobs are difficult to paint as romantic—this is the most intimacy you’ve shared with him, this emotionally distant and stubborn teenager who would usually rather fuck you senseless than have an actual conversation with you.

And whereas the multiple times you two have had sex before had been a culmination of adrenaline and boredom—a rushed fulfillment of carnal desires that was simply convenient, above all else—it is now less impersonal, as if there’s an underlying tone of affection in his touch.

You wouldn't dare say it is loving, not with where your relationship with him currently stands, but there's something hiding in his initiative.

If anything, he's grown comfortable with you, grown trustful of you, if the way he holds no reluctance over closing his eyes now—something he rarely did before, always preoccupied with scrutinizing your movements—is your only indication.

But you know that this is about him, about all the experiences he'll rediscover with a new understanding, even if all of his attention is focused on you and solely you.

Your reciprocating kisses are becoming sloppier, less attentive because of his increasing speed while his are lazy yet still deliberate, the pecks slow and unhurried as if he is paying closer mind to the stroking of his hand over the precision of his kissing. He swipes his thumb over the head at the end of each pull on your cock, and by the time you're reaching the plateau your hips buck into his grip on their own accord. He wedges a leg between your own, tangling the limbs as he pushes you closer to the edge.

With a guttural moan you tear away from the kiss, panting heavily as you pull him towards you, tightening your grasp around the back of his neck and pressing your foreheads together. He flicks his eyes open while you gaze hazily back at him, your nose digging into his cheekbone as his face appears as nothing but a blur of gentle creams cast over with soft shadows. You feel his spare hand trail from your chest to rest on the side of your neck, the pristine bandage scratching at your skin while his index finger lingers behind the shell of your ear.

Noiz speaks lowly, voice rasping as he mumbles words of encouragement that you struggle to register as he brings you to your limit, the final few strokes tightened, rough and unceremonious before your entire body goes rigid. The muscles of your face warps, eyelids clenching shut, brows knitting as your lungs take in a sharp breath. You come with an audible gasp, clutching onto the pillow against your temple and onto the tresses at the base of his skull.

He cups his hand over the tip, catching some of the ivory liquid in his palm and between his fingers as you ride out the waves of your climax, droplets sneaking past the curled digits and landing in disjointed patterns on your stomach and the bedsheets.

Taking a few laborious breaths, you shift your head away, pulling back just enough for the shapes of Noiz's face to sharpen and focus in view. The two of you remain in place, not moving to disentangle your legs from his, to release your hold on his nape, to remove his dirtied hand resting against your pubic bone.

Before you have the opportunity make a single move, Noiz presses the pads of his fingers between the spinal bumps raised at the back of your neck, and he asks you to stay. The single word is little more than a whisper; he doesn't use the word "please," doesn't go beyond a plain request, doesn't begin to implore nor elaborate to you for what he wants you for.

You don't need him to.

You give him a nod—the motion more sluggish than you intended it to be—before rolling your body over and partially onto your back to face the other side, removing the arm resting on his nape and stretching it outward to pull a few tissues out of the paper box atop the nightstand. With a blunt command, you have him hold out his right hand—the opaque fluid already becoming congealed on his palm, his fingertips, his knuckles where threads of it curl over the webs between his fingers—and you gingerly wipe it off, mindful of not irritating the skin.

Without a word, Noiz allows you to clean him up, showing no refusal or displeasure as you soak the small mess into the soft tissues, instead appearing rather content as if you lifted a weight from his shoulders. Once you've finished, you crush the tissues in your palm and toss it across the room, lying fully back onto the mattress and not bothering to see if the crumpled ball landed into the small bin beside the doorway.

Flat on your back and your vision flooded with nothing but the ceiling, there’s a subtle dip in the bed while you take in a deep breath. He shifts toward you, pulling your arm from its place beside you and lifting it over himself before settling his head onto your chest, letting go of your arm to let it wrap over his shoulders as he forms his body into your side.

He fits against you almost perfectly, his leg hooking around yours, his arm gliding across your abdomen until his fingers curl around your waist, his eyelashes ticklish against your skin as his eyes repeatedly flutter open and closed, his left arm squeezed between his chest and your ribs while his bandaged hand hangs limply in the air. Tentatively, you let your arm relax upon his frame, encasing his shoulder in your hand while you briefly glance down at the mess of hair sprawling against your jaw.

For a long moment neither of you voice a word, the stillness all but drowning the bedroom. Noiz traces a thumb in crooked, uneven lines on the ridges of your stomach, and without you having to watch the reflection wavering in his eyes you can sense that he wants to tell you something, contemplating a way to even begin what thoughts have been reeling in his head for the past four days.

Finally, with a halt in his absentminded stroking of your skin he parts his lips, the sentences streaming out of his mouth unsolicited, and he tells you that he is lonely.

He tells you that when his mind was slowly disintegrating while lying nearly comatose in that alley, he was alright with dying. He tells you that he thought—earnestly believed—he was going to meet his end that night, and for as long as he can remember he has always foreseen himself having a death with no one to mourn him. He tells you that even though it was Aoba who saved him, he is alive because of you.

There’s a faint tightening of his fingertips digging into your ribs as he continues—his voice a strain for you to hear clearly—and he says he doesn’t understand why you’ve bothered staying with someone like him for as long as you have.

He hadn’t posed it as a question so much as he had been merely thinking aloud, yet as you follow after the patterns forming in the bare ceiling above you, you silently wonder when this person—this insolent, uncooperative, neglected teenager—wormed his way into your core. Tracing backward to the events of the past few weeks, there isn’t a singular moment in your time with him that you can pinpoint where you genuinely began to care, where you let your guard down and he managed to become the center of your life since the collapse of Oval Tower.

And you wonder exactly why it was Noiz—the kid, the brat, the maniac—who took you all for himself without even trying.

Is it because of a protective instinct, an unexplainable desire to save someone who still has their entire lives ahead of them, to give them the future that was inexplicably taken from you when you weren’t much older? Is it because you see so much of yourself reflected in his own distant disposition, carrying the same stoic expression you've worn on a day-to-day basis? Or is it purely an unavoidable attraction that you hadn’t discovered until it was too late to properly recognize it as such, clutching onto his weakened hand as he fell apart?

You don’t know.

Shifting your hand from the round bone of his shoulder to weave your fingers through the velvet smooth hair jutting out from the back of his skull, you hope that he understands your gesture of comfort before you quietly ask, “Why me?”

Noiz doesn’t need clarification on your inquiry and with little hesitation lining his words he tells you that you are the only person to even tolerate his presence—much less care for him, in all senses of the word—since he was a child.

You can't see his face, but you can feel the faint furrow of his brow on your skin when he elaborates, telling you that his parents isolated him in a room where all of his needs would be met and then ignored the entirety of his existence, shunning him for his inability to feel pain after numerous incidents with the other children that ended in tears, in bruises, in bloodied knees.

He doesn't sound spiteful nor resentful as he speaks; if anything, he is dimly disheartened, the emotional wounds having scarred long ago. The inflection is only just slipping past the wall he is now gradually dismantling in front of you, yet despite the subtlety it is still a tone you are all too familiar with.

You say nothing as he opens himself bit by bit, absentmindedly stroking the locks pinched between your fingers while you silently listen. When he goes on to tell you that everyone else has either used him for information or for sex you're unkindly reminded of how you ended up as this tangle of limbs with him in his bed.

Readjusting your head on the feather pillow, you gaze out into the stagnant darkness as you point out that you, too, were using him. There's a bitter laugh that lowly erupts from his lips, and the only thing he says in response is a reiteration of the word "was."

* * *

 

In the early morning, standing in front of the mirror after carefully placing your contact lens back in your eyes, you open up your Coil and send Aoba a simple message reading “He’ll be alright.”

Before stepping into the shower, the sun hadn’t even begun rising, the skies as stark as you saw them the night before where Noiz finally decided to show himself to you; by now, you think there should be a subtle glow of cerulean peeking from behind the horizon as you step out into the living area. The gentle pre-sunrise breeze filtering through the slightly open veranda door grazes your skin as you approach the glass to watch the slowly ascending light.

After some peaceful minutes of your gazing at the leisurely crawl of the morning sun, you receive a reply consisting of only an attached image, the text body left blank. Opening the file you’re greeted with a sleep-laden Aoba, eyes not fully open as he carries a drowsy smile and holds a lazy thumbs up, hair messily cascading over his shoulders while he lies in the bundle of his bedsheets. It doesn’t portray a grand enthusiasm—mind likely too sluggish to truly illustrate his emotion—yet you know from his prompt response that he is genuinely, earnestly glad.

You hadn’t slept much last night. Before Noiz had fully nodded off to sleep, you pulled away for only a few moments, retreating to the bathroom to remove your contacts and to wash your face, and once you returned to the bedroom he had fallen into what you imagined to be a comfortable slumber. He looked just as he had that evening in the decrepit building crumbling away inside the Northern District—a young child without a worry in the world—but this time you could read him like an open book, laid out as if he was only for you to see.

You don’t expect him to wake up for a few more hours, noticing the dark circles lining his eyes before you switched off the nightstand’s lamp and coming to the conclusion that, for the past few days, he hadn’t been getting any fulfilling rest during his adaption to such an extreme change. You closed the curtains to shield the sun—just in case.

Over the course of about a week, Noiz returns to his old routine of—what you assume—dealing information regarding Rhyme and managing his team, and although he’s away for much of the day, you take small relief that the next time you hear from him is his footsteps echoing down the hall and not a distress call from a tiny, shrill-voiced robot.

He’s more outwardly intimate now, or as outward as the kid can get, and it’s largely confined to subtle touches—knees barely meeting while sitting together on the sofa, brushing hands while walking side-by-side in the shopping districts, fingers trailing the small of your back while he passes you—whenever he’s around. You find it almost endearing the way he touches you for seemingly no reason, even if it is only for a fleeting second of contact.

The two of you share the bed simply because it is convenient; rather, that is the answer you would give if he ever asked why you no longer sleep on the couch like you used to. He doesn't, however, and while he likely wouldn't elaborate how he feels about your almost constant presence, you know he doesn't necessarily object by the way his legs, his arms, his fingers eventually become entangled with yours each night.

However, he's still largely uncooperative, still acting the part of the stoic brat who does most things through impulse, who does well to not answer to the few inquiries you throw his way, who fills the trash bin with empty pizza boxes and take-out containers on a daily basis. Despite this—this familiar, distanced disposition you know he has carried long before you met him in that junk shop basement—he becomes softer as the sun begins to stow away behind the horizon, as he grows tired and begins losing the energy needed to behave as he always has with you.

He is slowly letting his guard down around you with each passing day, and there are times where you think that perhaps you should begin following his example.

Returning from an unaccompanied trip to the shopping district—specifically to the few clothing stores in the area that sell the simple style you prefer over the extravagant fashion aimed at the youth—you discover Noiz back home early, staring at himself in the mirror of the toilet.

Once he had fallen back into his original daily rhythm, you were the first to return to the apartment on the days where you had left as well. Even if you spent most of your time out of the complex than you did within it, you were always stepping through the front door before the person who actually lives here was. With him here already, you don’t know what it was that has broken his consistency, what it was that skewed his integrity.

Placing the plastic bag—weighed down by new shirts and proper sleepwear—against the front hall wall and moving to shrug off your coat, the bird perched upon your shoulder lifts himself into the air. You assume he’s leaving to speak to the rabbit-faced blocks, and when you peer down the hall, you see him approach the cubes still connected together as they rest on the couch cushions. They greet one another as they often do—two juxtaposing voices in tone, volume, and clarity trading simple words back and forth—while you hang the aging coat onto the rack.

You don’t bother to rush—kneeling down to untie and step out of your boots—while distantly hearing something that resembles the sound of marbles against glass. Setting the loosened shoes beside the wall, you leave the entryway to approach the washroom door unceremoniously.

He acknowledges you quietly—humming a greeting and meeting your gaze through your reflection in the mirror as you stand under the door frame—before swiftly returning to scrutinizing his face on the polished surface. You say nothing, merely waiting for him to launch the conversation, and while he begins twisting a cap of the barbell piercing between his eyes he tells you he no longer wants to play Rhyme. You watch him unscrew the steel ball, his eyelids cast downward while he works the piece of jewelry between the pads of his fingers.

When you ask him why, all he says is it is because of a “change of heart,” not elaborating further as he pulls out the polished barbell from his skin, dropping the steel ball and the bar into the plugged sink basin. The metal rattles soundly against the white ceramic, a pleasant chiming to your ears. The accessory accompanies a few other pieces of plain, silver-colored jewelry, and you notice the reddened dots on the back his hand—six on the right, four assumed on the left —as he raises them upward to remove the rings at his brow.

You press no further with your questioning, instead stepping properly inside the small room and standing at his back, facing the looking glass along with him as he unscrews one of the piercings. Hovering your fingers over the metal at his nape, you silently inquire about their removal; he understands the wordless question, responding with a yes as he drops the first ring into the sink.

You gingerly press a finger against one side of the topmost barbell, pushing the bead out enough for your fingertips to grip onto it. You twist at the enclosure, taking care to not pinch his skin and irritate the opening as you work the small piece off of the threaded bar. Once you’ve dropped the petite ball to join the gradually growing pile of stainless steel, you begin the arduous process of pulling the piercing out of his skin.

It takes a while for the piecing to budge, and while you focus on the extraction you briefly think that he must have never removed these two surface piercings even once until now.

Halfway through he makes a slightly disgruntled sound—one you haven’t heard from him before—and he flinches at the slow process occurring at his neck. You pause, shifting your eyes to peer over the mess of strawberry blond at your jaw to check his reflection, yet almost immediately he instructs you to continue, rotating the last brow ring out of the skin and tossing it away.

The kid says nothing more, pulling down a corner of his bottom lip to resume. Likewise, you do the same, dragging the bar out with careful precision while listening for any other sudden reactions. However, the first nape piercing is removed without any further incident, and you let it join the rest of the abandoned accessories gathered in the sink.

The second and last nape barbell is easier than the first, slow yet less of a struggle as it was earlier. When you've tossed the other half of the pair into the basin, you examine the symmetrical box of reddened dots resting below the base of his skull, and with your voice low you ask if his skin feels alright. His response sounds slurred—perhaps even humorous—with his fingers curled behind his lips while he speaks, telling you that it's fine—itchy, if anything. You remain unmoved in your place, looking over his head to observe his progress.

He looks naked—bare and vulnerable—while still fully dressed in the clusters of whites and blacks, of navies and mints. He looks naked in a way so different from yesterday, facial features no longer riddled with protruding metals and silvers, acting—what you think—as a symbol of his personal growth.

He pulls out the first pointed piercing from his lip and immediately transfers his attention to its counterpart, the final piece still left under the skin of his face. Glancing over at his heavily pierced left ear through the reflection, you predict that as his next step, mentally counting five ornaments on just the single, small organ. Within several moments he's dropping the last snakebite into the humble mound forming around the sealed drainage pipe.

Noiz turns his head to his right, tilting his chin down towards his shoulder to investigate the accessories of his ear, staring at them as if he hadn't even begun deciding on what precisely to rid of. He flicks his eyes to look back at you—the movement is so quick that you almost miss it—while he lightly tugs at the shell of his ear, giving himself a better view of the constellation of sturdy steel formed around it.

You watch him twist the bead of the industrial and remain as quiet as he does, no words passing amongst the two of you. The silence is not necessarily uncomfortable nor is it tense in any manner, but you have to remind yourself that if he didn't want you here for this, he would have pushed you away long before this afternoon.

He progresses downward, disassembling the bar before continuing to the pair of rings, but when the only ones remaining are the tragus and the pair of tunneled plugs, he stops. He makes no intent to peel away at his clothing or slide his hands beneath the waistline of his trousers, and when you raise an eyebrow at his stopping point—without verbalizing your assumption—a small smirk stretches his lips.

He cranes his head around to meet your gaze properly—ivory teeth peeking past upturned lips, chartreuse eyes flashing a slight glint, narrow face stripped of steel piercings, pale skin littered with miniscule pink spots—and it's similar to how he looked at you only some weeks ago, yet the tone is no longer antagonistic, no longer a mockery.

It's genuine enjoyment.

Before you open your mouth to speak, you lightly trail your fingertips over his forearm, a ghosting touch over the cotton of his undershirt that once would have been impossible for him to feel. He turns his body to face you properly, and he lifts his arm to mimic your action, to mimic the feather-like touch on your hip. When you ask him if he wants to bathe with you, his smile falls, his eyes narrowing not in suspicion but in confusion.

You’re aware of why he is, if anything, perplexed at your request, a similar one to his that did not go over well, one that lead to the laceration of his palm; that lead to the near disintegration of his mental health; that lead to the evening of solemn insight; that lead to the two of you standing here in this small room, mistrust gone, metaphorical walls crumbled and strewn in shambles at your feet.

He waits for some kind of signal from you, and so you nudge at his arm gently before letting go, stepping out of the toilet to open the bathroom door. He follows after you as you press the light switch, the ceiling lamps flickering alive at around half their maximum intensity, coating the expansive room with a gentle, warm light over its pallor stone tiles.

In the corner sits a spacious, porcelain bath, the one you’ve seen on several occasions yet never took the time to really look at, and it’s large enough to accommodate two people comfortably. The surface is pristine white, clean and unused, and you think that the only reason why this suite has a bathtub—especially of its size—is because it was simply built with it installed. Noiz had no reason to use it, you’re aware, and he likely wouldn’t have had the patience for something less efficient than a shower.

With little hesitation you begin peeling away at your clothes, curling your fingers underneath the hem of your t-shirt and lifting it over your head, the fabric catching and taking the pink headband with it. From the edges of your vision you see Noiz do the same, loosening his tie before unbuttoning down the length of his shirt. You pull out the band caught within the fabric, then move to fold and leave them stacked on top the counter.

Before you unbuckle your belt you snake your fingers into the front pocket of your jeans, taking out the contacts case, the plastic familiar and worn down, and you can feel the pause of movement from the person beside you. He’s never seen the small container before—something you made sure of—and regardless of what he may be thinking, he says nothing, returning his attention to the button of his trousers.

Together, the two of you disassemble your images—the unforgiving thug, the unsociable teenager—in a heavy silence and toss them into uneven stacks next to one another, accessories left to sit over folded pant legs and crumpled socks.

He steps away from the countertop and heads for the bathtub. Looking over your shoulder, you watch him bracing himself on the side to turn the faucet valves, and the tap easily floods the tub with crystal clear water with little resistance.

You trust that he tests the temperature as the basin fills when you face forward once more, taking the contacts case between your fingers and unscrewing the lids on each side. Setting them aside on the speckled stone you can sense his gaze boring into your back, observing you silently, and even without being able to see the tone of his expression you can tell that he's attempting to decipher your motivations for this.

Pulling down the skin just below your right eye, you gingerly grip onto the delicate lens and take it from the surface of your cornea. You place the tinted contact into the wide cup of the case and quickly do the same for its counterpart.

As you settle the second lens in its respective case and begin twisting the lids back, you determine that this is likely the last time you will seal them away. There is nothing you can use to justify your continued wearing of these sea green-colored shields meant for a drug that you do not foresee yourself coming in contact with again, and their use as a disguise, as a means of hiding holds little ground, as well. You have no reason to live as another person anymore. They no longer serve any purpose.

With a deep breath you unravel the thin tie from the bundle of hair at the top of your head, holding the black string between your teeth as you gather all of the dreadlocks together at the back of your skull into a single tail. You loop the tie around the mass of locks, hair pulled back and high enough that it hardly presses onto the nape of your neck.

When you turn around, you're met with Noiz sitting on the edge of the tub, right hand held out under the heavy fall of water from the faucet as he watches it pour, bandaged hand resting on the leg folded over the basin's side. His body language is so relaxed, so casual while he blindly measures the water temperature with the untrained nerves of his skin as his guide, despite how exposed he is in this quiet, still moment.

He hears the soft sound of your bare feet on the tile as you approach, turning his head to look up at you. His mouth parts just slightly as he looks at you carefully, taking in your image fully and completely, until he pulls his arm away and rises to his feet. He lets out what seems like a faint, awed exhale, the audible breath barely escaping past his lips as he gazes into the sharp tones of gold encircling your pupils, his focus faltering over your unmasked eyes.

Your voice holds a slight inflection of lighthearted provocation that you can't help as you inquire what he's looking at you in such a way for, and he shakes his head weakly, simply saying it's only nothing, unbothered by your tone as he memorizes your face with new colors.

After an elongated moment, Noiz turns away to shut off the water flow, and without dipping his toes in at first he plunges his entire lower leg into the considerably deep water. You can't stop the small chuckle erupting from your throat when he instantly steps out of the tub, recoiling with a surprised hiss at the high temperature—water spilling across the floor with a soundly splash—before mumbling under his breath in aggravation.

For the first time in years, you take comfort in the lightness settling in your bones, and you think that you’re alright with your life going on like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please take a look at the comic Ari drew for a scene in this chapter over [here](http://splitbricks.tumblr.com/post/97127006432/)! ♡


	6. VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Met in the night like it was wrong  
> Laugh at the life left now that we're gone  
> I won't go back  
> I won't go back  
> I love you too much
> 
>  
> 
> [ ♥. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8wx6WMFfbE)

You’re scanning over the words lined inside the book in your hand while sitting on an aging sofa when you hear the faint creaking of the front door's hinges. From your peripheral vision with the black arms of your reading glasses obscuring your line of sight, you watch him step through the doorway before it shuts closed behind him.

Shifting your gaze back to the paperback you listen more to the sounds at your right—the rustle of a coat being shrugged off, the light knock of the coat rack with an uneven leg, the tapping of shoes on the wooden floor as they’re toed off—than to the literature in your palm. Within several seconds, Noiz walks just past, then settles on the cushion beside you before lying down on his side, easing his head onto your lap.

Quietly, you ask if it was a long day, curling your unoccupied hand under the rope of beads hanging from his temple, and as you thread the hair ornaments between your thumb and forefinger he mumbles a tired “yeah.” Without another word passing among the two of you, you continue your reading and absentminded play of his hair in a way you’ve done countless times before, feeling his body melt into the cushions, into your leg as he placidly sighs out the stresses of his day.

You recall that it’s been over a year since the fall of the pearl white tower, since that night in the deteriorating building in the abandoned districts. You recall that it’s only been merely a few months less than that since you left that liberated island; since you’ve returned to your birthplace, to the mountains, plains, valleys you grew up in; since you've come back to the cabin you built with your own two hands, wooden slabs laid out at a time when you were nothing but debilitated and alone. 

And you recall that this person—this maniac who initially followed you only out of sexual curiosity—didn't even hesitate to go with you when you told him you wished to return home. Even after you said that you wouldn't expect him to go with you, he merely asked when the two of you were leaving and didn't appear to second-guess his choice at all.

You didn’t say it out loud, but it means so much to you—his lack of reluctance—more than he probably realizes.

Noiz spoke little the entire way to the cabin after the second flight. The twigs and branches crunching beneath your feet, the kind breeze brushing your face, the distant chirping of wild birds all encompassing your trek through the forest, and the few times you looked back at the person accompanying you all you could see on his face was silent understanding as he took in the burnt yet slowly healing surroundings.

Immediately after stepping through the front door, you opened the windows and began cleaning, years worth of dust floating in the surrounding air so densely that each of you had to return outside to revive your lungs with fresh air after several coughing fits. He didn’t complain about the cleaning, but rather about the burning sensation in his eyes, swollen and reddened as his tears attempted an expulsion of the irritants. He was still stubborn then, insisting he could take care of himself when you flushed his eyes with a soaked washcloth.

The first day was less awkward, less forced than you anticipated once the cleaning process was finished, and it was as if he always had been there with you, here in a cabin you had only ever lived in on your own. You had set aside any other housework that needed to be done—scrubbing the windows, oiling the door hinges, replacing rotten floor panels, deep cleaning the furniture—for the day after, and instead spent the afternoon and evening leisurely.

Sitting side by side on the couch—you reading an old book, Noiz calibrating his Coil—in front of the crackling fireplace; cooking a simple, medial dinner and eating across from one another like every time before; silently enjoying the company of each other as the sun settled past the snow-dusted mountaintops was how you eased into your old home with someone new.

Neither of you shared much conversation, and you were okay with that.

When you went to bed later that night, the two of you managed to fit onto the narrow mattress through lying on your sides, your back facing Noiz and his chest flush against your skin. He had curled his body around yours—quietly grumbling something about how cold it was—and when he wrapped his arm to settle his hand over your sternum you could feel the fresh scar of the palm graze your skin. The breath you hadn't realized you had been holding came out as a long shudder, and everything hit you, beating at your core with a unexpected ferocity.

Despite being on the threshold of falling asleep, he must have heard the shakiness in your voice when he pulled you in closer, burying the side of his face between your shoulder blades as you struggled to grasp onto your equanimity in the darkness of the bedroom.

This moment had condensed itself into a searing singularity, an almost painful culmination of your first journey—experiencing snowfall for the first time, hunting deer with your father, weaving textiles with your mother, watching your home crumble under scorching flames, enduring imprisonment in a foreign land, failing to enact your revenge—until now, wrapped in the embrace of a person who once used you in many of the same ways you used him.

You have changed him and he has changed you in such an unintentional yet staggering manner that it simply cannot be taken back.

It may not have been because of you directly, but you are the reason why he has touch—why he can feel physical pain when he is hurt, why he can run his hands over your skin and sense the heat coming off of you. You are the reason he is alive. You saved him.

He threw words at you without quite understanding the strength behind them, grasping your wrist out of quick decision, fingers clutching around your pulse as he convinced you of something different, convinced you that you were more than your revenge. He is the reason you are alive. He saved you.

You had begun your second journey with what feels so long ago—before you returned home, before you had accepted him—and now had only recently realized the additional chance you had been given.

Part of you feels as if you don't deserve such kind fortune. Part of you feels that, as an individual who lived for so long with the belief that he was merely a dead man walking, you should not be here. Part of you feels you do not belong back in your homeland without the family that was taken from you, yet still living here with someone you could grow to love just as much.

This wonderfully painful moment became one of the many memories you hold dear to your heart, one as precious to you as the ones you keep of your mother, of your father.

The days preceding after comprised of both of you repairing the myriad of damage found throughout the cabin, your chores intermittent with meal breaks. In spite of how exhausted he looked by nightfall, Noiz hardly whined about the labor he had endured during the day; you think that it was because neither of your Allmates were capable of contributing—bodies too small and too specialized for purposes they weren’t programmed for—and he therefore had no reason to not aid you with the restoration efforts.

You silently appreciated it all the same.

On the fifth day, when the cabin finally felt as if it hadn't been left to collect dust for years on end, to collapse under its own weight with no one to live in it, you began the arduous process of converting your dreadlocks back to the loose, flowing waves you once had. You awoke at dawn, and after removing the feathers, clipping a few inches off, and soaking the bottommost layer with conditioner, you sat on the sofa to begin picking at the ends of the dreads with a metal comb, working from the inside layer out.

Noiz arose a few hours later, leaving the bedroom in only his underwear, and asked what you were doing with his words slurred and his eyes bleary. With an entire layer already unraveled, you tell him as you pick at a halfway finished dreadlock that it’s similar to a change of heart. He hadn’t replied to that, but instead returned to the bedroom, and when he emerged once again he had thrown on those pair of dark grey sweatpants and an old sweater that you had left behind, the deep maroon and oversized sleeves just passing his knuckles.

He joined you on the sofa, turning his body to face you. You stopped in the middle of your progress, looking at him in quiet anticipation for what his next words or action would be, and all he asked was if you had an additional comb. A subtle smile pulled at your lips, and after digging into the simple tweed bag of hygiene supplies in your lap, you handed him the smaller counterpart of the comb you were using.

At first, he only observed your method for a while, but after grasping the general process he started working on a lock resting off of your shoulder without you having to ask.

Much of the day was spent untangling your hair, the two of you having lunch later than expected due to getting caught into the rhythm of work, yet the procedure was still considerably accelerated with his inexperienced help. You decided to stop for the night as the sun had fallen several hours earlier, a few ropes of hair still hanging over the right side of your head as you prepared a modest dinner.

The next morning it didn’t take you long to finish pulling apart the several locks remaining—completing your laborious work before the kid had woken up—and you washed your newly fluid hair for the second time that day, brushing through it repeatedly to rid of any knots or tangles left behind. Covering your shoulders with a towel, you allowed your hair to air dry as you crafted a new hair ornament at your desk, wrapping threads over and over to make a small dreamcatcher.

He awoke while you were tying the first feather onto the willow hoop, and with only a simple greeting he observed your creation of the single accessory composed of earthy, neutral tones, in contrast to the vibrant pinks you had once worn. When you were done, you weaved a lock of hair resting just behind your ear, clasping the ornament at the conclusion of the braid when you finished.

Noiz had no comment as you turned to look at him, and before he left for the kitchen, he bent down to kiss you on the corner of your mouth, the simple embrace brief but tender. You watched him head towards to cabinets to make himself something to eat—his feet dragging on the wooden flooring—and stood up to return to the bathroom.

Witnessing your reflection in the mirror—eyes no longer masked, hair flowing down almost weightlessly, ornament similar to the one your father once donned, clothing now warm and comfortably fitting—you finally felt like the man you used to be, the man you were before you had lost everything you loved.

You took a deep breath, and it’s like you’re inhaling pure oxygen.

A few hours later you approached the extravagant cockatoo, perched upon the dining chair beside the coffee table in sleep mode, and you stroked a thumb between his eyes like you have done for years. He powered up with a gentle chime, greeting you in his low, dandy voice with the usual and familiar “what is it?” You held out your arm in invitation and he understand immediately, leaping onto the limb easily.

You waited for a quiet moment before opening your mouth, then telling him outright that you were to give him a name. His body perked upward, the feathered crest atop his head fanning outward, but he said nothing within his visible surprise.

Within the silence, you granted him the name Rurakhan, taken after the god of wind—a title befitting of the individual who not only acted as an additional pair of eyes but also as your right-hand in your quest for vengeance. He remained still at your sudden proposal, taken aback if anything, but soon his wings flared out from his body briefly for readjustment. The bird sat proud upon your arm and the only verbal response you received was his understanding.

As a rare token of affection, however, he nipped at your freshly unraveled hair before removing himself from your person, perching on the chair once again to preen at his feathers.

You’ve allowed yourself to finally become attached, a feeling you had originally dropped entirely in order to protect the operations of your goal, and with the swelling at your core you are grateful that you could be granted with such compassion after the first life you had led. Most of all, you are grateful that life has become what it once was for you, where you no longer have to uphold the image of man you are not, where your largest concern is not the unruly crew of criminals you lead but the daily routine of making sure Noiz wakes up in time for work.

You’re the first to get out of bed—he rarely wakes up before you, not since that morning of the day he nearly lost himself—and you begin your morning the same each time: bathing, brewing coffee, preparing breakfast, reading the news off of your Coil. Most days, Noiz will wake up on time on his own, but every once in a while you’ll have to nudge his sleeping form a few times for him to join you at the dining table.

The two of you walk to work together until you reach your own place of employment, trading a brief farewell before parting ways. While you work just a town away—the closest one to the forest—as a traditional craftsman, Noiz works several towns over as help desk and IT for a mortgage company, an upper-tier position that was undoubtedly given to him due to his knowledge and skill with computers. He doesn’t discuss work with you often, but you know that he is by far the youngest in his department.

Because the pay both of you receive is largely the same, you work less hours than you would have without a second source of income, and you often return home about an hour before Noiz does. The rest of the evening is spent with quiet conversation over dinner, you reading an old favorite, him browsing the web or performing maintenance on the Allmates, possibly watching a film until neither of you can keep your eyes open for much longer.

Over the weekend, you occupy your early hours of Saturday with cleaning the cabin, primarily consisting of dusting the living room and scrubbing the kitchen or the bathroom. Later, during the afternoon, you’ll cut down a short tree for the fireplace, and even though Noiz accompanies you every time, he seldom aids with the actual process of chopping firewood—preferring to observe you as you work—and only helps you carry the logs back to the cabin. Honestly, you don’t mind if it means he’s amused during an otherwise mundane chore.

You think that when a run to the shops and the markets, to the bank or the post office aren’t needed, when you and Noiz can simply relax in bed together—limbs tangled among the sheets with nothing but the sound of each other’s sighs and heartbeats reverberating throughout the room—are the days that he enjoys the most as those are the ones where you get to see him smile almost endlessly.

Yet the smile of his that you treasure most is when you properly adorned his hair for the first time during a solemn, lazy Sunday morning.

A few weeks before, his strawberry blond tresses began growing out longer than what he was used to—hair nearly covering his ears completely—,and was on the verge of getting it cut. You had made him pause, weaving strands between your fingers before you both left for work. The weaved lock was short then—jutting out to the side just slightly, almost comically so—but he kept it, let it grow longer as time passed, and eventually it hung naturally from his temple down to just past his jawline.

He never questioned the braid, not even when you introduced beads as well as feathers into his hair, the ornaments—modelled heavily after your own—handcrafted by yourself during your free time. Stone and wooden beads alike, each one cascaded down his braid, across his hair in brilliant tones of turquoise and rose while balanced with a light shade of rosewood. At the tip, you clasped two modestly-sized ivory and brown-colored feathers, and around the tie for the clip is a glass rabbit charm you rendered after his own Allmate, simple yet recognizable.

After you gave him the pair of turquoise plugs carved and polished by your own hands, and after you secured the bracelets, the anklets onto his body, the two of you moved to stand in front of the full-body mirror in the bedroom. He absorbed the unfamiliar image of himself through the reflection for a lengthy, quiet moment, and you watched the wistfulness rise in his brow, features growing soft for only a split second before shifting to a more devious expression.

With a smirk splitting his mouth, he teased you for the proposal nature of it all while craning his upper body around to look at you face-to-face. The amused tone vanished when he thanked you however, lips forming into a gentle, kind smile, and that is the one you know you will always remember him by.

It was in how he traced his fingers beneath your collarbone, how he kissed you that you knew he was sincere, his lips meeting yours like they always do, and with each passing day, you find yourself falling in love with everything about Noiz. 

You love the way he looks in the morning, when the sun is peeking through the undersides of the curtains and his hair is sprawled every which way, adornments softly glittering in the early sunlight, his eyelids only half open as he buries himself deeper into the bedsheets.

You love the way his brows lift, the way his eyes catch this shimmering glint as they widen at the sight of a wild rabbit among the greenery, his body pausing in the middle of whatever movement he was caught in to watch the timid animal, if only for a brief moment.

You love the way his brows furrow, knitting at the base of his forehead while he works outside in the garden with you, picking weeds out of the soft soil if only out of a personal obligation to ensure you aren't doing all of the housekeeping on your own.

You love the way he seems so at ease while performing maintenance on the two Allmates—the cockatoo cradled in his lap, the cube settled in his palm—with the artificial glow of the holograms cascading over his face, features relaxed in contentment as he works out of his own initiative.

You love the way he tries to get under your skin, lips stretched in an ever familiar grin as he pokes fun at you—often about your age, you've noticed—and you love the way he pouts, the way he backtracks when you retaliate with the name “maniac” or “kid,” gaze shifting away as he denies your claims with a hint of chagrin lining his voice.

You love the way his cheekbones paint themselves pink with the blood underneath his skin, the way the flush spreads across his shoulders and over his chest in bed. You love the way his body goes stiff, the way his thighs squeeze your hips as he comes, lungs gasping for air as his back arches along with the sensation.

You love the way he threads your hair between his fingers almost unconsciously, mindlessly twisting and curling and weaving the strands around each digit while he sits curled up beside you on the sofa during chilled, solemn evenings and temperate, weekend afternoons.

You love the way he kisses you out of nowhere—regardless of what either of you may be occupied with or where you are, be it around the house or somewhere in one of the neighboring towns—and does so even incessantly, for no reason other than simply wanting to.

“Mink.”

And you love the way he says your name. 

Caught with your mind drifting away, his voice pulls you back into the present moment, the words printed onto the paperback in front of you blurred and distant as you remember where in time you are.

You glance downward at your lap and meet his gaze, pale green eyes turned and looking up at you with slight bemusement at your period of mental absence. Setting the book aside, you hum in response while pausing your stroking of the beaded hair captured in your hand, and he asks if you're hungry.

As you respond with yes and before you can give him another answer after he inquires what the two of you should eat, he sits up and gingerly removes your glasses from your face, pressing his lips against your own, and you think you could never tire of such simple domesticity if it means you could feel the quirk of his lips every time he kisses you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A fic idea that was initially only going to be a little over eight thousand words has grown into the small novel it is now, all out of my thirst and frustration for a rare pair that had little material for it. I can only hope that I gave these two and their dynamic justice.
> 
> Thank you to my best friend [Jess](http://archsagesoren.tumblr.com) for helping me through this monster of a project at the beginning when it was a mere 3k. Special thank you to [Ari](http://splitbricks.tumblr.com), who acted as not just my main beta, [drew art](http://splitbricks.tumblr.com/post/97127006432/), and [gave me ideas](http://splitbricks.tumblr.com/post/98245930237/), but also became a good friend of mine through my experience of writing this, and to my friend [J](http://criticalattack.tumblr.com), who also worked as an absolutely lovely beta reader for _palms_. 
> 
> Most of all, thank you so much for reading! It means a ton, and I hope you enjoyed it. Feedback would also be absolutely wonderful, but kudos will suffice, too. And if you'd like to share this on tumblr, click [here](http://offdensen.tumblr.com/post/99856362381/). ♡


End file.
